


Dragons of the Mind

by lyricwritesprose



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-17
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-15 05:40:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11224470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: In a dark and unfamiliar landscape, Ace struggles to save people while trying to figure out whether she's being played—and by whom.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains mental manipulation, psychological horror, vague references to abusive situations, and one or two strong swear-words, so be advised. Brit-picking by Persiflage, who had to correct way too many usages of the word "cellphone." The fic also has a lot of references to "The Curse of Fenric" and may not make sense without knowledge of that serial.

The trans-temporal psychic transmitter looked like a joke. It was powered by a hand-crank that might or might not have come off an eggbeater. The casing had probably been liberated from an old record player. And the bit that went on your head looked _exactly_ like a colander with wires woven through it. The only part that appeared remotely high-tech was the touch plate, a white square of—possibly—glass. Or plastic. It felt more like plastic.

For all that, Lree did sense something as she put the colander on her head and her hand on the plate. It wasn't telepathic contact, not even close, but a sense of distance. As if the study was much larger than it seemed; as if her thoughts were falling into a cathedral.

"Hello," she said aloud—in Trelmian Diplomatic, not English, because she wasn't familiar with the device and wanted her thoughts to be as clear as possible. "I apologize greatly for any impudence or impertinence. I am Lree Gale, wife of Ace McShane, and I need your help . . ."

~~~~~~~~

It was nine-forty-three at night and Ace McShane was on a coach several miles from London, being extremely bored.

She and her daughter Nisha had taken a day trip to see Ace's friend Donna. Donna was an A.C.E. donor and a spitfire, determined to take her newfound riches and Do Something with them; the current plan was a literacy foundation for disadvantaged children. Ace had a certain amount of experience in building international organizations, and rather to her own surprise, she had become Donna's informal consultant on everything foundation-related. And Nisha seemed to enjoy mothering Donna's two-year-old son, Wilfred (currently known as Freddie to avoid confusion with his great-grandfather), and Donna could tell absurd stories of office life in a way that always made Ace laugh, and her husband Shaun was a sweet, restful person even if it had taken Ace several meetings to figure out that he actually could talk. It was true that she had an ulterior motive _on top of_ the other reasons to cultivate the connection, but it wasn't that big a thing—and she definitely shouldn't feel as if she was holding out on Donna by not telling her.

There were only eleven other people on the coach, counting the driver. Ace amused herself for a little while by trying to guess their life stories from the looks of them. The small bloke in the front, for instance, was an accountant or a clerk of some kind, and he liked his Sudoku; the little booklet of puzzles was well-thumbed. The ruddy-faced, jowly middle-aged man reading the _Daily Mail—_ no, that should be the middle-aged _wanker_ reading the _Daily Mail,_ and that was all Ace really needed to know about him. The swot in the tweed—university, probably, desperately imitating some beloved older professor right down to his dress sense, only to have any fleeting shadow of dignity dispelled by the failed-boy-band hair.

Ace lingered on him; for an instant, she thought he had the Look. The next moment, she wasn't sure. There was _something_ about him, but it wasn't quite the indefinable energy that followed ordinary humans who had reached out and touched wondrousness. In fact, he seemed very closed in on himself. Walled off. The body language of a man holding himself aloof.

The woman with the twins was currently deeply regretting having bought them pop; one of her boys was carrying on a steady monologue of, _mummy, I have to wee, mummy, I really have to wee, this is_ important, _mummy._ The big ginger fellow, currently chatting up a rather pretty woman in a patterned hijab—

The swot in the tweed was watching her.

It wasn't overt. He wasn't staring at her; Ace might have been slightly less disturbed if he had been. Instead, he kept his head angled as if he were reading his book, only moved his eyes.

There was a calculation to that sort of observation, rather different from Ace's own casual perusal of the coach's occupants. She decided she didn't like it at all.

He looked away too quickly for her to give him her best _try it and explode, arsewhistle_ glare. Back to his book, with a slightly overdone pantomime of casualness. It was a novel, too, not some dull text; Ace didn't think he was looking around just from boredom. She narrowed her eyes at him and kept staring, and a moment later he rewarded her with a quick glance.

Definitely watching her. Or watching _Nisha,_ which was a prospect that made Ace's hands itch for her bat.

She didn't have time to process the thought. There was an eye-searing white light, a jolt that seemed to take her stomach in one direction and her body in another, and then all the lights on the coach went out.

~~~~~~~~

Several people screamed, including Nisha. A man started cussing and carried on at length.

And then Nisha was sobbing, but it was the sobbing of a ten-year-old girl who deeply wished she wasn't, not the crying of a child in overwhelming pain and fear. Ace reached into her jacket for a torch.

She was preempted by a penlight and a sudden presence in the aisle. "Look at me," the creeper in tweed ordered Nisha quietly, and then shifted the torch back and forth between her eyes.

Ace brought out her own, much larger torch, hoping that nobody would think to ask how she could fit something the size of a billy club into a jacket pocket. "Is everyone all right?" First things first, after all.

"I lost my glasses," Nisha said. "I _need_ my glasses." Which was quite true; she had absurdly poor eyesight.

There was a general babble of _what happened,_ plaintively underscored by _I wee'd, mummy. Mummy? I wee'd._ Tweed Creeper sat back on his heels. "Well, they can't have got far, can they?" He raised his voice. "Everyone, we're looking for a pair of glasses, sort of silvery-goldish frames." He looked back to Nisha. "You're fine. No concussion, pupils are normal. Although in a few days, you'll have a lump on your head like a brachiosaurus." He smiled, a slightly off-kilter expression, and Ace was alarmed to see Nisha smiling shyly back.

"Are you a doctor, then?" Ace said challengingly.

The smile fled instantly. "Not as such," the man said, "not exactly." He stood up. "I think," he declared to the universe at large, "I've gone _right off_ buses."

A girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen with bushy brown hair and way too much makeup, said, "What _happened?"_ just as the coach's reading lights came back on.

They weren't at full power, and they were a sort of grimy yellow color instead of crisp white. They also weren't all working; it was just the lights where people had been sitting, which left quite a lot of the coach in deep shadow. Still, there was a general feeling of relief. "First things first," Ace said. "Everyone check the person next to you, make sure they're okay."

The driver had got out of his chair, looking somewhat unsteady and holding onto the passenger seats. "I didn't hit anything," he said. "I swear I didn't. There was _nothing."_

"I believe you," Ace said. "It didn't feel like a crash. It felt like—"

_"What?"_ said the teen.

Like a very, very rough transmat. "Like a lurch," Ace improvised. The motor wasn't running. Did internal combustion engines fail during a transmat? Ace wasn't sure it had ever been tested.

_"Mummy, I wee'd in my_ trousers. _Mummy . . ."_

"Er," the accountant said, "are these the glasses?"

They were. "Yes," Ace said, "thank you." She handed them back to Nisha and turned in the middle of the aisle, assessing. People were very frightened, and they were probably right to be, but nobody was screaming and running. Not yet. That was good. "All right. We might be in a bit of a bind, but we're all alive and in one piece, which means that whatever's going on, it's fundamentally sort-able. Now—" She focused on the driver. "Can you see out the front, at all? Where are we? Off the road, on the road?"

"Who're you, then?" He might have meant it to come out challenging. Instead, it sounded lost and forlorn.

"My name's Dee McShane. This is my daughter Manisha. You?"

"Curtis. Curtis Beck. Um, I couldn't see anything a moment ago, the headlights are out—I'll see if it's any good now—" He wobbled back towards the cab.

Ace turned her attention back to the passengers and started soliciting introductions. The teen was Britney Smith. The accountant was Emmett, the mother was Janine, and the _Daily Mail_ reader—Ace resigned herself to rescuing him, too—was Gary Bainbridge, and she was going to have to remember not to call him Vernon Dursley even though she suspected he deserved it. There was also Shirin, Todd, and Patrick.

Nobody had a mobile phone signal. But then, Ace hadn't expected them to.

Creepy In Tweed had moved onto Janine's two children and was talking quietly to them. Given that she still wasn't sure if he'd been staring at her or Nisha, Ace decided to interrupt. "And you, bowtie. Who're you, then?"

He stood up and turned towards her, forefingers poised in the air like a hunt-and-peck typist. "Nobody. Absolutely nobody in particular." A pause, during which Ace thought of cyclopses and the danger presented by nobodies. "Ian," the man said, sounding reluctant. "Ian Chesterford."

"I can't see _anything_ outside," Curtis the driver called back. "I think the windshield might be covered with leaves. I'm gonna take a look out the—"

_"No!"_ And now everyone was staring at her. "I'll look out the door," Ace said, more calmly. "Give me a minute. Nish . . ." There was really no privacy; she couldn't say, _don't trust that Chesterford bloke, I don't like the way he watches people._ "Stay put," Ace finished, and made her way up to the front.

~~~~~~~~

 

A torch beam out the door revealed slanting forms that looked more like leaning stones than trees. Ace pressed her palm against the door. It was neither excessively hot nor noticeably cold.

They weren't going to get anywhere sitting inside, not with all the phones out. So Ace put her hand inside her jacket pocket and nodded to Curtis. Curtis threw the lever.

It _was_ rock outside. Bare rock, dried-blood brown in the flashlight beam. None of the stones had been obviously shaped; they looked like natural, wind-carved rock, the kind you might find in Nevada or Utah. There was a slight breeze, dry and scratchy and smelling stale, as if everything around was long dead. And it was cold, a sort of sly, sneaking cold that would feel only slightly chilly at first but worked its way into a person's bones.

"What the hell," Curtis said behind her.

Ace swept the torch beam towards the front of the coach. The grille was flush against a large stone; the window had to be inches from it. They were very lucky they hadn't—no. Wait. Ace stalked towards the front of the vehicle, all senses tingling with the pursuit of an anomaly.

The grille wasn't _against_ a large stone. It was inside it. Just a little bit of the coach had disappeared seamlessly inside the rock. Materialized there, Ace thought.

She looked back along the coach and noticed a smaller rock stuck into one of the back wheels the same way. "Not going anywhere in a hurry," she murmured to herself.

"No, I mean seriously. What the _hell._ What the helling—hell. How are we—where's the _road?"_

"At a guess? Pretty far off." Ace looked up. Pure blackness, untouched by stars. A quick search with the torch beam didn't reveal a cave ceiling. "Cloud?" she asked the sky rhetorically. "Or nebula?"

"What?"

"Well, it sounds like we're in a pretty large space. Hear that wind?" It was one of the least comforting winds Ace had ever heard, lonely and whispery and somehow resentful, so she went on quickly. "We aren't in England; rock this color reminds me more of Australia than anything else. But I don't see any plants, there are no stars—"

"That's 'cause it's cloudy," Curtis said. _"Right?"_ Ace didn't think he meant _right_ to come out quite as desperate-sounding as it had.

"Yeah . . . could be, but I'm not convinced. We're nowhere near people, because we'd see the lights even more on a cloudy night. Besides, nobody on Earth goes around beaming coaches off highways. Although . . ." Space-time anomalies, dimensional shifts, little flaws in the fabric of the universe—there were things that could happen by accident. The fact that there was nobody here to greet them, or more likely threaten them, did argue for some sort of happenstance rather than a plan.

"Wait. Beaming, like—"

_"Star Trek,_ yeah. But don't mention it to aliens. They nitpick the science like you wouldn't believe."

Curtis stared at her. "You're _mental,"_ he said finally, faintly.

"Where do you think we are, then?"

"I don't know—we crashed, maybe I hit my head, maybe we're not actually—oh, God, I could be _dead."_ He made a sound that was halfway between a sob and a disturbingly hysterical giggle.

"No, you aren't." Ace turned around. "Curtis? Curtis, listen to me."

"We're dead, we're all dead, I crashed the bus and we've gone to Hell, we're—"

"Stop that."

"—dead, we're going to be here forever, we're—"

_"Oi!_ Curtis!"

"—God, oh, God, please—"

And then he stopped. The hair on the back of Ace's neck rose.

She flashed the torch up to Curtis's face.

It was absolutely calm. Despite the darkness, his pupils were so tiny that his eyes didn't look quite real. "Kill her," Curtis said serenely.

Ace bared her teeth. _"Let him go, toerag."_ It wasn't just that that particular phrase made her insides give a nasty lurch. She knew a psychic takeover when she saw one. And she could feel something, cold and ghastly, not so much an actual sensation as a creeping dread from down where her instincts lived. This was an evil place. There were bad things here. Malicious and rotting and hateful.

Curtis didn't answer her. He started walking instead.

It was the deliberate walk of someone who was being remote controlled and not going to stop any time soon. Ace said, "Curtis! _Curtis!"_ without any real expectation of a response, then swept his legs out from under him and pounced.

He didn't put up any resistance, which surprised her. Britney appeared in the doorway just as Ace had him solidly sat upon. "What's wro—what are you _doing?"_ And then she took in the rest of the landscape. "Oh, Jesus, where are we?"

"Dunno," Ace panted, "but he went all funny. Get a couple of blokes to give me a hand, would you?"

~~~~~~~~

It took several disorganized moments to get Curtis back into the bus. He didn't struggle, but he _did_ try to start walking every time he was reasonably close to upright, and he was too big to drag easily. By the time Ace had got him sat down and restrained (by getting Vernon—dammit, _Gary—_ to sit on his legs) Britney had apprised everyone of their not-in-England situation.

"Mum?" That was Nisha, and—dammit, double dammit—she'd been sitting right beside Ian Chesterwhatsit, deep in conversation. "Is this one of your things?"

"One of what things?" Britney's voice was too high-pitched. "What sort of things?"

"A crisis," Ace said. "I do crisis management." Sometimes, admittedly, by managing to create a crisis. Now, aiming crises at the people who deserved them, that was somewhat more delicate work . . . "Yes, it's true, we're in the middle of some sort of badlands. And yes, it's true that Curtis here has had some sort of—break."

"But you _beat him up,"_ Britney said.

"Oh, shut it." That was Gary Bainbridge, and quite to Ace's surprise, he softened his tone immediately. "Look, she couldn't let him go rambling off, could she? He might've walked off a cliff. We've got to stick together, otherwise who knows what'll happen to us?"

"Exactly." Who said she was stubborn once she made up her mind about someone? "Gary is right; we're a team. We've got to act as a team. Now, what've we got? Do Chesterford and I have the only torches?"

The consensus was that Chesterford and Ace did, in fact, have the only torches. There were numerous mobiles, which might as well be used for light since they weren't good for anything else at the moment. Patrick had a lighter. Ace had an _industrial_ lighter, the long wand-shaped kind, which she handed off to Emmett on the principle that he seemed like a fairly sane, if non-assertive sort. "How did you," Britney said, and then, "how did she—"

Nobody seemed to be listening, which was possibly just as well. _Yes, my pockets are bigger on the inside_ didn't always go over wonderfully. Some people panicked—reasonably, when you thought about it—when people showed weird and unearthly powers. This was not the time to explain that Ace's social connections could bend the laws of physics for her.

She wished the Professor was here.

"The coach isn't going anywhere in a hurry," Ace said. "There's a rock right through one of the tires." In a rather different way than she made it sound. "Now, we aren't finding out anything here. I say let's all go and have a poke around, except that someone has to sit on Curtis—literally. If we—"

She was interrupted by a short shriek from Janine.


	2. Chapter 2

Lree was sitting at the table in her kitchen, feeling rather as if she were in a storybook.

She had finished her message, felt the words vanish into echoing distance, and taken off the colander-thing with a sense of desperate expectation. And then absolutely nothing happened. No blue police box arrived with the noise of grumbly space-time, no little man with question marks and an umbrella. No help. Nothing.

She closed her eyes and fought the urge to cry. She had been doing things, she had been working steadily since Ace's coach disappeared—calling the police, haranguing the bus company, calling in favors from everyone that A Charitable Earth had assisted. She'd even got _Donna_ to have a go at the police, and if Donna couldn't shout someone into greater efficiency, it couldn't be done. She'd kept moving because if she stopped, she'd collapse.

The psychic transmitter had been the last chance. She'd run out of things to try.

Lree was almost ready to let the tears start anyway when she heard a clunk in the kitchen. A cupboard door opening.

Lree went rigid, right up to her head-tendrils, and then stood up so fast she almost tipped the desk chair over. Either it was Ace and Nisha— _please, oh, please_ —or it was _him._

She ran to the kitchen and skidded to a stop in the door, dismayed.

The man was a stranger. He didn't match the description Ace had given her, and Lree had never seen him before in her life. Human, pale, and tall compared to her.

He had put the kettle on and was going through the cupboards, without any apparent rhyme or reason to his search. As Lree watched, he popped open a canister of cayenne pepper, shook some out onto his finger, and dabbed it onto his tongue.

She'd never done anger very well. It wasn't in her genes. But _this_ —some burglar, or worse yet, some old enemy, poking through the kitchen and making free with their possessions, while Ace and Nisha were lost and very possibly dead—

Lree wasn't as physically strong as a human, but she did have one asset that nobody on Earth ever expected. She lashed out with her mind.

It should have worked. The blow should have stunned the man's conscious self, allowing Lree to punch a simple suggestion like _go away_ straight into his emotions. Instead, he caught it.

Caught _her._ It was as if she'd tried to slap the ocean only to find out that the ocean was alive and aware and could flash-freeze its waves at will, seizing her arm and keeping it captive for as long as it felt like—and the ocean had eyes, and it was _looking_ at her. She was a butterfly, she was a speck—she was effortlessly, implacably held—

He let her go. Lree grabbed onto the doorframe for support.

"Not a human trick," the not-at-all-a-man said softly. He produced a silvery wand, flicked it open, and pointed it at Lree. She started to spread her hands, to make the Trelmian gesture for surrender, but all that happened was that her shimmerfield turned itself off.

Lree was humanoid, but not enough to pass. There was her indigo skin, to start with, and the six finger-length tendrils—three at each temple—and her rather scalloped ears, and the extra joints in her fingers. She needed her shimmerfield. Depended on it. If he'd broken it, she couldn't even go outside—

The entity paced towards her, eyes shining, focused like a cat stalking a mysterious rustling. "But Trelmae aren't telepaths either," he went on. "And then there's the name. Trelmae swap middle names when they marry, but you're using Gale as a surname. Lree—short for Lritanu?"

It meant _twelve._ "Subject 12-KH, sir," Lree said. If he knew her name— "You're . . ."

"I'm the Doctor." A smile like sudden sunlight. It was as if the ocean—which had already adequately demonstrated that it could overpower her on a whim—had revealed that it just wanted to play. "But McShanes can call me Professor if they like. D'you have any jammy dodgers?"

Which was how she came to be sitting in her own kitchen, still a bit breathless, while a living legend made her tea.

~~~~~~~~

"They just closed their eyes and went to sleep," Janine said tightly. _"Both_ of them. At once. You didn't see it, it was like—it looked like somebody just switched them _off."_ She shook one twin—Ace thought that was Dylan—and then Brady, the other one. And then she shook Dylan again, harder.

Nothing happened. "Don't," Ace said, starting forward. "Don't get rough with them." Because if they'd been attacked by whatever took over Curtis, they weren't going to wake up until it was good and ready. "Listen, just—"

"No! You don't understand, these are _my boys,_ you can't tell me not to worry, or everything's going to be fine! You don't know—"

"I _do_ know," Ace said, "I'm a mother. Janine, you have to calm down, for—"

"She's not your real child!"

There was a short quiet. It only missed dead silence because Ace could clearly hear Shirin sucking air between her teeth.

Ace counted silently to ten. In Trelmian Common. "First," she said, trying to keep her voice measured and cool, and rather suspecting she was hitting _calmly ready to disembowel someone_ instead, "white women have mixed-race children all the time. Second, it's not actually any of your damn business whether Nisha came out of my physical body or not. Third—"

"I just meant," Janine stuttered, "I meant, you said her name is Manisha. That's not—I mean, that's not the sort of—"

"Manisha Purkayastha was my best friend. She was sweet, and funny, and brave. And she burned alive because some _racist shitstains_ decided to play with Molotovs." Janine flinched back. Ace realized she had snarled the epithets, and took a deep breath. "Now, let's get back to business. Anyone here have any medical training?" Silence. Ace looked around and noticed that one person in particular was avoiding her eyes. "Chesterford?"

Ace would have rather _anyone_ else be their medic, even Ver—Gary Bainbridge. For his part, Chesterford looked around with the general air of a man who'd rather neuter unrestrained polar bears than be put on the spot, but at length he waggled his palm back and forth.

And what the hell was that supposed to mean? "Would you mind having a look at the boys?" Ace said, with somewhat exaggerated politeness.

He gave her a long look, then stepped over to do it. The boys were slumped together on the seat, looking quite peaceful. Janine had already seen to Brady's (or possibly Dylan's) unfortunate trousers situation; apparently, as a mother of young boys, she carried spares in her large, battered bag. Ace made a mental note to find out what else she had in there. Wet-wipes, plasters, all manner of useful things—

"Wish the lights would come back _proper,"_ Patrick murmured after a moment. Shirin agreed fervently—and so did Ace, although she didn't voice the sentiment. There was something stale about the color they were now. It made the coach passengers look like moderately jaundiced zombies, albeit zombies with wide, frightened eyes.

"McShane," Gary said, a bit plaintively, "do you think it's safe to get off his legs now? He hasn't even twitched in five minutes."

It hadn't been five minutes. "In a moment, we'll try it and see if he gets up," Ace said. "If he starts to move, jump on him again. We really _can't_ afford anyone wandering off in a daze." Or, more to the point, under mind control. "Chesterford? What can you tell us?"

Chesterford shook his head. "Not much at all." He darted a very sharp and, Ace thought, somewhat nervous look towards Curtis as he spoke, and then moved his hands quickly. _—You sign?—_ British Sign Language, with the swift motions of someone who knew it well.

Ace raised her eyebrows. "Ye-e-es . . ." But she wasn't about to have a private conversation with Chesterford while the other passengers looked on. At best, it would be rude; at worst, she'd have an outraged mob on her hands. "What's going on?"

He raised his own, nearly nonexistent brows back and cocked his head at Curtis. _—It's listening. Look at the eyes.—_

Well, _that_ clocked in at about nine kiloclowns of creepiness. "What does he mean?" Britney said from behind Ace, sounding high-pitched. "What's listening, what's going on, _where are we?"_

Ace thought she caught a split-second flicker of dismay in Chesterford's eyes, as if he hadn't expected anyone else to catch the communication. "If you have any ideas," she told him, "now's the time to tell us."

He gave her a slight, sad quirk of a smile. "No."

"What'd he say?" Patrick demanded, and was seconded by most of the rest of the bus passengers. Except for Janine, who had bent forward to try and wake her sons, this time by coaxing. "Brady? Come on, it's time to get up, love. Time to get up and go. You know how much you hate naps, you always have. I remember how your da had to take you for a car ride to get you to sleep because the sound of the motor was the only thing that'd do it—" Her voice cracked.

"He thinks," Ace said reluctantly, "that something's listening through Curtis." She looked at Curtis.

Chesterford was right. There _was_ some awareness in those eyes.

"What do you mean, listening _through—"_ Shirin cut herself off. "You mean, like, possession. Like he's been possessed by demons, or—"

"No! No, most things that play at being demons are complete posers. If he's possessed by something, it's probably an alien." Everyone was staring at her. "Which still isn't _good,_ I admit, but it means all we have to do is find the alien, bust the hell out of their stuff, and tell them to send us home before I make everything go boom." That got a smile out of Chesterford, a surprisingly nice one. Ace wished she knew what the hell was going on in his head.

"Dylan? Dylan, please wake up. Oh, God, this is my fault, I should've—I should've been watching more closely, I should've—Dylan, _please_ don't be taken over—"

"Now," Ace went on, "I planned to take two people out and scout the area. It's still a good idea. Todd, you look like you can handle yourself in a dustup—"

"You think _I'm_ going out there? _He_ put a toe outside and came back a zombie!"

"Fine. Patrick, then." And hopefully he'd realize that it was because he was over six foot tall and broad-shouldered, not because his name was Patrick Roark and he looked more Irish than the Blarney stone. Ace hated stereotyping; she didn't want him to think she assumed he was a brawler. "And Shirin, I think." Shirin wasn't big, but she was young and fit, and looked like she could run if necessary. She also looked as if she wanted to flee right now. "The rest of you, I want an inventory of _everything_ we've got. Sporks, pocket lint, doesn't matter; everything's a tool. Emmett, you've got a pencil—"

"Oh, God, they're never coming back, they're never going to wake up, they're—you'll come crawling back. And then I'll make you sorry."

Britney jumped. The reading light above Janine's former seat burnt out with a soft pop.

All eyes snapped to Janine. She straightened up and turned towards the front of the coach, face absolutely emotionless.

Chesterford, the paranoid watchful part of Ace noted, had spun like a cat. And made an abortive motion toward some inner jacket pocket, as if he had stopped just short of going for a weapon.

Curtis was stretched out on the floor between Janine and Ace. Gary Bainbridge cursed under his breath, then lunged to his feet and overbore her, knocking her down by virtue of simply being much heavier. But that meant he was off Curtis's legs, and Curtis was moving again, and there was a brief scramble as Todd tried to get the hell away from him at the same time that Emmett (Ace was liking Emmett more all the time) deputized himself to sit on the man, and the two of them got tangled up in the middle, and Gary had to trip Curtis by hugging his legs as the driver tried to push past.

At length, the scrum resolved itself with Janine and Curtis both restrained and lying lengthwise in the aisle. Ace deliberately did not swear, especially not in Draconian (which had lovely sibilant-laden expressions involving peoples' nethers and an animal called a drill-weasel), and didn't tear at her hair. If she even hinted that _she_ was afraid, God knew what everyone else would do. She picked her way over to Janine's seat, looked at the reading light, and clicked the switch several times.

Nothing happened. "Ergovore?" she murmured to herself. "Or else—" Or else what?

_Kill her._ That was a command, although Ace had no idea who it was meant for. But _you'll come crawling back_ —that was just a taunt. A petty, human sort of taunt, better suited to a teenage bully than an alien menace waiting for them in the darkness.

"Right," she said, half to herself. "Patrick. Shirin. And an inventory. Everybody—"

"Ms. McShane?" It was Britney. "Er, Dee? It's Nisha. She just went to sleep."


	3. Chapter 3

Lree and Ace had met through the Invisible Road.

Lree had led all her crèche-mates in their escape from the Project, not because she was particularly brave or brilliant—she wasn't—but because she was just disobedient enough to read her handlers' minds, and she knew what they thought of their batch of freaks. She also knew what they were meant for: dangerous infiltration, scanning presidents and generals while passing as a masseuse or courtesan or other high-level servant. And she knew that the handlers had decided to cull some of the less steady telepaths. 14-JP, who sometimes put his hands over his eyes and screamed for everybody to shut up, just please _shut up._ 15-AY, with a stutter and an odd blinking tic that no combination of medication could quell.

They were Lree's brothers and sisters, and anyone who wanted to hurt them would have to go through her, even if she was shaking in her lab-issue paper slippers.

When she met Ace—bold, free-spirited, fresh from detonating a stolen battle cruiser _as a distraction—_ Lree's first instinct was to defer to her as a master and dread any sign of anger. She had been ruled all her life; she was accustomed to it. The second time she requested permission to ask a question, she was treated to a blistering rant on self-respect, self-determination, and miserable little pissant Nazi toerags who weren't fit to wipe the mud off her feet. About halfway through, Ace realized that she had Lree backed against a bulkhead shaking, changed her tone instantly, and gave Lree a long hug to calm her down.

That was when Lree started admiring Ace. She wasn't quite sure, but she thought she fell in love when Ace casually gifted Lree with her middle name so that she'd have one that wasn't based on a number. Ace didn't realize at the time what an intimate gesture it was in Trelmian terms, and Lree didn't realize that Ace had offered the name in part because she couldn't enjoy it herself—she despised what it meant in combination with her first one, all bluebirds and ruby slippers and the colorful fantastic country turning out to be just a dream of someone trapped inextricably in gray. But despite cultural miscommunications, Lree realized early on that she would follow Ace into a black hole.

She started out working as a linguist for A Charitable Earth. That was another thing about Ace; when she saw telepathy, she didn't see a weapon, she saw a tool. Her first suggestion was that Lree become a counselor and try to smooth out damaged minds, but none of the Project Telepaths had the endurance for that. Dipping into trauma on a regular basis would have driven them insane in short order; probably something to do with the genetic modifications that made them incapable of turning violently on their handlers. But Lree was adept enough to plant the basics of any language she spoke directly into Ace's brain, and she spoke fourteen, not counting dialects. She could learn more quickly, as necessary. It was vital work.

It was also intimate. By the time they started dating, Lree could tell whenever Ace walked into a building she was in. By the time they were married, she could point in Ace's direction even if she was miles away. And by now, Lree had a faint connection with Ace even if she was off world. It wasn't the profound telepathic rapport of song and legend. Lree occasionally felt especially intense emotions through the link, but she couldn't pick up physical sensation, or a sense of Ace's surroundings. Ace couldn't sense Lree at all. Still, it was something Lree had come to rely on, if only for her peace of mind.

When the coach disappeared, Lree had known for a fact that Ace was still alive. Far away, but alive. She thought she caught some adrenaline spikes—if you were a being who had a hard time with anger, fury and fear tended to taste similar—but that could easily mean that Ace was introducing her kidnappers to the wonders of unstable chemicals.

Until there was a bottomless, horrible moment of despair. Even across the distance, it was staggering. Lree couldn't imagine what it would have been up close.

But it wasn't as bad as what came after, which was _nothing._ No sense of Ace at all. As if she were . . .

Lree refused to use the word _dead._ Not aloud. That might make it real.

~~~~~~~~

The damn thing had taken Nisha.

Oh, she looked extraordinarily peaceful compared to the two adults on the floor, even smiling in her sleep, a slight, secretive Mona Lisa expression. But that didn't mean her mind wasn't somewhere else, frightened and isolated. "Oh," Ace breathed, "it is bloody _on."_

She pulled her Louisville Slugger out of her jacket.

There was a babble of near-hysterical questions, mostly adding up to _how the helling hell did you do that?_ "—the hell _are_ you?" Britney finished up, sounding outright panicked.

"Her pockets are bigger on the inside," Chesterford said. "Obviously."

Britney stared at him. "Wh—but—"

"If they weren't," Chesterford went on, with the air of a (small P) professor talking to a particularly obtuse student, "the baseball bat wouldn't have fit."

_"That's not an explanation!"_

"Explanations," Ace said, "later."

Chesterford made a sound like a backwards snore.

"Action now," Ace went on, ignoring him. "Todd and Britney, look after Nisha and the twins. Gary, see if we can keep Curtis and Janine restrained just by belting them in. Shirin, Patrick, with me." She strode towards the door. "The short version is," she said over her shoulder, "this isn't my first rodeo."

Outside, the rocks and the stifling darkness hadn't changed a bit. Ace waited, bat poised, as Patrick and Shirin joined her. "This way," she said, and started off.

"Um. Why this way, ma'am?"

"This is the way Curtis was walking when I tripped him up. And it's just Dee, or McShane."

They hiked in silence for a bit. After a short distance, Ace reached into her really-rather-ridiculously-large pockets, and—after retrieving a camping flask and a bag of throat lozenges—located her chalk. "How much do you have _in_ there?" Shirin muttered incredulously, keeping her voice low as if they might be overheard.

Well, it wasn't a bad precaution. "About a backpack worth of supplies. Not counting the bat." She scratched an arrow back towards the coach, and peered back at it with narrowed eyes. Even given the anemic lights, it was dimmer than it should be at this distance. She scanned side to side with the torch but didn't see any trace of particulates in the air. "Mostly just standard camping stuff, but I do have some medicines and a rebreather." She caught Patrick's look. "That's nothing. I saw the Professor conjure a full teapot out of his pockets once. Although it's hard to know if it was _actually_ in there, or if it was some sort of sleight of hand . . ."

"Professor?" Shirin echoed.

Ace smiled sadly. "He taught me everything I know."

"You're a crisis manager," Patrick said, managing to infuse dozens of questions into a sentence that didn't sound like one.

"Yeah." The silence didn't sound satisfied at all. "Well, technically, a charity worker. I run an organization designed to aid refugees and immigrants."

"And . . ."

"And sometimes we get some pretty far-out immigrants. See, aliens—it's not like Hollywood. They don't all show up in giant flying saucers and try to invade the Earth, though I've gotta admit, you do get that. _Most_ beings in the universe just want to live peacefully and maybe win the lottery. But it's the same all over; when a tyrannical country or a local warlord starts to throw their weight around, the ordinary people scram as fast as they can. Sometimes they fetch up here. Well—there."

"There are aliens," Shirin repeated. "On Earth."

"Some, yeah."

"Are _you_ an alien?"

"Nah. Just studied with one." And married one, but Ace wasn't in the mood for a discussion about that. _Yes, my wife is a telepathic alien experiment with small cute tentacles on her head, yes, I said wife, look, if you want to have a wankfit about bisexuals and lesbians and anyone else who doesn't fit your stupid templates, I will be forced to beat you about the head with a large hammer marked CLUE. And unless you're getting into an interspecies relationship yourself, I do_ not _answer anatomical questions._

"Oh," Shirin said in a small voice, and was silent.

After a little while, Ace put out her hand. "Hold up." It wasn't as if they were, or _could_ be very stealthy while using a great whopping torch, but there was no sense charging in blindly. "I see something that's not rocks."

~~~~~~~~

At some point, the vehicle had been made of metal.

Technically, it still was—sort of. The rust reminded Ace of some deep ocean hulk. The only thing missing was life, fish swimming through the empty windows and coral growing slowly on the frame.

"Is it a spaceship?" Patrick whispered.

"Don't think so." Ace picked up a transparent shard of glass. "See this?"

"Part of the window, yeah?"

"Yeah, and it's pretty much like our glass." The torch showed it to be somewhat orange-tinted. Ace wondered if that was age or natural color or the grimy patina that seemed to infect this entire place. "Spaceship windows are superplass or diamantium or things like that. This—" She tossed it at the ground. It broke. "Not space worthy. No, I think this was probably—" The conclusion was rather unwelcome. "A coach."

"Oh, God," Shirin said. "They were caught here too. It just goes around _taking_ people."

"Maybe. "Ace gouged the metal with her pocketknife. Underneath the first layer, there was some sheen left. "Good news is, there're no skeletons. The bad news is that they didn't shut the operation down. So it can't be as simple as finding the central controls and flipping a switch . . ."

"Wait! _Did you hear that?"_

All three of them froze for a moment.

"I didn't—" Shirin started in a whisper.

_"Dee? Deeeee!"_

"Never fails," Ace said, "things always happen to the other party. Whichever one you pick." She cupped her hands around her mouth.

_"Wait!"_ Shirin grabbed Ace's arm. "It might not be them," she went on in a whisper. "It might be—whatever's doing this—it's trying to find us, it's trying to lure us out—"

"Yeah, but it brought us here. Why would it need to lure us out? Unless—" Ace paused and then strode towards the call. "Come on, you two."

"Unless _what?"_

_"Miz McShaaaane!"_

"Unless it's jerking us around." She was aware that there was an edge to her voice, and let it remain. "In which case the _last_ thing we want to do is cower here like scared mice. If—"

The voice in the distance let out a terrified shriek.

~~~~~~~~

The rocky terrain would have been difficult in daylight. In cave-like blackness, it was a nightmare. Even with all her experience dashing full-pelt over rocks, it was pure luck that Ace didn't turn an ankle.

As it was, she left Patrick and Shirin behind and nearly crashed into Britney, who was the source of the screaming. "I saw something," she gabbled, grabbing onto Ace and clinging. "There was a thing, I swear it was moving, there was—"

Ace swung her torch in the indicated direction. There was another—well, it was shaped rather more like a bubble than a bus, but she suspected it was another coach. Grimy and aged-looking; this one was plastic, not metal, so it couldn't rust.

No monsters. Entirely possible there never had been a monster. Also entirely possible that there had been, but it wasn't there now. "I think it bolted," Ace said. "What're you doing out here?"

"I came to find you. I _had_ to find you. It's that—Ian Chesterford. He's it, he's the one."

"What do you mean?"

"There's always a traitor. Every time you watch a movie, there's someone—someone who lets the monster in, or someone who sells out— _it's him._ It's him."

It would be downright irresponsible just to say, _hah! I knew it!_ even though she felt like it. "What happened? Tell me exactly."

That was when Patrick and Shirin came down the slope, into the small dip where the alien bubble-bus had fetched up. "He sat down next to me," Britney said unsteadily. "He asked if I was all right. He was _nice._ I mean, he made it sound like he really wanted to know, like it was seriously—really, really important to him. He said—I don't know, some stuff about coaches and buses, how much he hated public transportation, and he specifically said not to tell _you—_ I thought that was odd. And then he asked me—he asked me if I would sleep through it all, if I could."

Ace had been expecting something a bit more dramatic. "That's it?" she said.

_"You weren't there!"_ Britney struggled visibly to moderate her tone. "It wasn't just like that. It was like it was—it was like he could _do_ it. Listen, he talked with the two boys, and then they fell asleep, and he talked with Manisha and then _she_ fell asleep, and he's going to talk to us all—one by one, youngest to oldest—until there's nobody left awake and whatever brought us here comes for—" Britney gulped, quashing the rest of the sentence, or, from the look on her face, fearful nausea. "It's him. I know it."

"I am not going to victimize you," Chesterford said from behind her, "I am not your father. Please don't confuse me with him. It's insulting."

Britney whirled, gasped, and fumbled the mobile phone she'd been using for light. Ace stepped forward and put herself beside the girl, bat held casually. Chesterford, for his part, seemed content to keep his distance from both of them. He met Ace's eyes for an instant, but it was a closed, impenetrable look, unreadable to her.

"How?" Britney said, sounding strangled.

"How do I know you're a runaway?"

Ace didn't take her eyes off Chesterford, but she reviewed Britney's appearance in her head. Typical teenage clothes, including the hoodie tied around her waist, but did they look like they'd been worn a little longer than normal? And the makeup—thick enough to hide a minor bruise or two. Was it also enough to make her look older?

Even if it didn't, it was the sort of thing a teenager would _try_ in order to look older. "Not to worry," Ace said. "I ran away myself, when I was young." Although she hadn't seriously left home until—well, until something very dark indeed had decided to use her as a pawn _(kill her)_ but Ace did her best never to think about that part. "Do you know her, or are you just playing the odds?" That was to Chesterford.

"Playing the odds?" Shirin said.

"When someone runs away from home, it's usually a pretty safe bet that they have parent trouble. Statistically, her dad's the best pick."

"I know a broken trust when I see one," Chesterford said. He made his voice softer. "I understand. But you have to believe me, Britney. There are horrible things in the shadows, but there are also help and hope and people who fight the dragons, and not everyone who _could_ hurt you, wants to. I would never harm you. I swear, on the souls of everyone I've left behind, I would never harm you."

There was a breathless moment.

"Trust me," Chesterford said. "I'm not your enemy."

For Ace, at least, the last words broke the spell. They weren't right. They didn't quite work. The speech had power—and _that_ was worrying, scary, really, true word-power was more dangerous than anyone realized—but the last phrase somehow revealed the paint and sawdust behind the theatrics.

"You see?" Britney said. _"You see?_ He's doing it again, he's being like—he's trying to get to me—" She looked from Ace to Shirin, and then to Patrick, and back. "None of you believe me, do you? He's _not normal,_ he gets inside peoples' brains, and none of you—" She swallowed a sob. "None of you believe kill her."


	4. Chapter 4

"No."

He didn't say it sternly. Lree looked down anyway, hands wound tightly around her teacup. "If it is permissible to ask—"

"Oh, stop it. It's always permissible to ask. Mind you, I take no responsibility for questions that happen to get turned inside out, accidentally misunderstood, deliberately misunderstood, half-answered, snarkily answered, or ignored until they get bored and wander off. But here's the thing: there are rules to time. Laws. And it's true that the laws can be broken, or better yet, bent, but they mustn't be disrespected. Believe me. It's been tried."

Even if she hadn't been a telepath, Lree thought, it might still be possible to tell that he wasn't a young human who moved oddly. There was something old and haunted about the eyes.

"In this case, I'm here because you sent me a message. You sent me a message because you lost your connection with Ace. I can't go back and stop the coach from being taken because that would erase the very thing that brought me here. What's more, I can't follow it in the TARDIS and rescue Ace—possibly cutting the connection myself—because that wouldn't account for the burst of despair that she felt."

Lree closed her eyes. "It's my fault," she whispered. "If I'd sent the message sooner—"

"Oh, _Gale._ Stop that." The Doctor's hands, warm from his own teacup, covered Lree's. She looked up, surprised. He gave her a brief flicker of a smile. "Trust me." It could have been a command—she was sure he could have backed it up telepathically—but instead, the feeling was almost more like a psychic invitation. _This is what I am. Come and see._ And she could feel a tiny whisper of him through the skin contact. She was sure that he could have hid lies or deception from her, but suddenly, she was equally sure that he wasn't.

He wasn't giving up. For this, there _was_ no giving up.

"We will find her," the Doctor said. "I promise you, we will find her. But—" _Incomprehensibly advanced alien power_ did not, in Lree's opinion, sit comfortably with the word _pout,_ but she couldn't think of another word to describe the expression he made. "I suspect I may owe Ace an apology very soon. Possibly in the form of something anachronistic and flashy and against my better judgment, like a jetpack. Because I'm going to have to get sneaky."

~~~~~~~~

_Kill her._

This time, it was harder for Ace to suppress her flinch. Patrick and Shirin, by contrast, seemed to take an instant to realize that Britney had just been taken. The first person in motion was Chesterford.

He moved much, much faster than Ace had anticipated from his off-kilter, awkward walk, but she was closer to Britney. They grabbed the girl together. Ace dropped her bat, not wanting to break any bones, and spun her around even as she started walking. Chesterford did something fast and sharp that made her knees buckle for an instant and used the momentary limpness to hoist Britney's body onto his shoulder. Britney said, _"Nuh!"_ but Ace wasn't sure if it was an attempted protest or just a physical reaction to the jolt. 

Ace scooped up the bat and put it away, not taking her eyes off Chesterford. She was fairly sure he'd done that by jabbing a knuckle into one nerve cluster or other. And _that_ meant that he either had a thorough knowledge of human anatomy—consistent with the medical training he denied having—or some knowledge of combat.

She meant to ask him what he did for a living. She even opened her mouth to do it. And then she caught sight of his face, and all the other questions crowded that one out. God, he looked _desolate._ As if he'd failed his best friend. As if Britney was dead.

"You okay?" she said, without meaning to.

He looked at her, and his face was cold and distant again. She might have almost imagined the break in the mask. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Not even remotely an answer."

"We're on another planet," Shirin said, sounding incredulous, "in the middle of the night, without food or water or any way back, and people are going all pod person left and right, of _course_ he's not all right! Are you sure you're _properly_ human?"

"Yes, I am properly human. I'm just—" Ace sighed and made her voice deliberately more gentle. "It's like being a doctor, all right? I'll care later. And we do have water, by the way, I've got a camping thermos. It's not much, but it's there. Now, let's get Britney back to the coach."

It took them longer than it should have, even though Chesterford proved to have a decent memory of the path he'd taken. Following Britney. While she was running, from what he said. Having left his penlight on the bus, with the others, and navigating by mobile phone light. It was hardly a _straight_ route, but that might be because Britney had been disoriented in the darkness.

Ace was accumulating a rather long list of things she wanted to know about the man. If she could get him to answer her truthfully. They moved in silence until Ace and Chesterford both saw the light from the coach windows, which once again didn't penetrate the darkness as far as it should have. "Not fog," she murmured to herself, "fog would get _brighter,_ not darker . . ."

"What?" Shirin was right behind her.

"The light," Chesterford said, "attenuates too fast. As if something is draining it out of the world."

Well, he was quick, whatever else he might be. "You noticed too, huh?"

"Difficult not to. And it's more than that. There's an air about this place . . ."

He trailed off as they came up on the coach.

Ace's first, startled impression was, _that's not our coach, our coach was new._ Only it was; it had the same logo, was resting in the same position, interpenetrated by the same rocks. It just looked as if it had been driving around for ten years of hard wear. Rust speckles—

Ace rushed forward. She had a momentary dread that years had passed for the coach while they were only away moments. _Nisha, Nisha, oh, God—_

But when she burst inside, there were Emmett and Gary, both looking up in startlement, dismay, and then rather desperate relief.

"Merritt's gone," Gary reported. It took Ace a moment to remember that was Todd's last name. "His light burnt out the moment he did. And then another light went. Is—" Chesterford must have come in behind her, carrying Britney, because Gary looked past her and swallowed the rest of what he was going to say. "Oh."

~~~~~~~~

"Before he went," Gary reported, "he said, 'you'll feel every worm.' What's that supposed to mean?"

Gary was becoming less Vernon Dursley by the moment, as far as Ace was concerned. He certainly looked like he was holding up better than Emmett, who was starting to appear hunted. "It means something to someone," Ace said, checking the two toddlers and Nisha.

"What do you mean?" Patrick and Shirin were inside, now; that was Patrick.

"Kill her, you'll come crawling back and I'll make you sorry, you'll feel every worm. They aren't random. They aren't even generic threats. They're _barbs,_ deliberately designed. You'll come crawling back was aimed directly at Britney. _Kill her—"_ She very carefully did _not_ hesitate. "Is for me. And the bit with the lights burning out when someone is taken—it would be one thing if something was draining all our energy. But I think it's letting the lights stay on—maybe _keeping_ them on—on purpose. Because putting out lights one by one is scarier than cutting them out all at once. It's playing with our feelings."

"How would you know that?" Emmett said.

Ace made an expression that fell rather short of being a smile. "Oh, trust me. I know when I'm being manipulated. I can taste it." Sometimes she thought that teaching her to sense manipulation had been the point of it all. "There's only one being in the universe who's allowed to play with my emotions, and he isn't here. Now, we need to—"

"Again?" Chesterford wondered.

There was something different about his tone. Icier, more distant. "What do you mean," Ace said, "again?"

"Do you honestly expect any of us to listen to you again? Or haven't you worked it out yet? This is _your_ fault, McShane. This," he put Britney down on a seat, placing a firm hand on her chest when she tried to get up, "and everything else." He waved vaguely to indicate the coach as a whole.

Britney managed another _"Nuh!"_ Ace still wasn't sure if she was actually trying to say anything, but she felt a flash of heat and adrenaline deep in her bones, as if she were about to go into combat.

It was Gary who jumped to her defense, however. "Oh _God_ no. We're not doing the movie cliché. We're not going to go for each other's throats. McShane has some idea—"

_"McShane."_ Chesterford made the word into a scornful epithet. "McShane says that this 'isn't her first rodeo.' Have any of you thought about that?" From the look on Emmett and Gary's face, they hadn't thought about much else. "McShane has been through something, something that makes her comfortable with the idea of aliens. McShane has pockets that are bigger on the inside. If you had to pick the person on this coach most likely to be radiating some form of energy—something that makes it easier for aliens to find this coach and take us all—who would _you_ pick? Then there's Britney. She was running scared. She asked McShane for help. When she saw, when she _knew_ that she was never going to get it—" He brushed a squiggly lock of hair out of Britney's eyes. "She went out," Chesterford went on, and for a moment, Ace thought she could hear a trace of emotion in his voice besides contempt. It was gone again instantly. "Like a candle. And you're going to go along with the woman's next brainstorm? Seriously?" He shook his head. "Emmett, let Curtis up. You and I are going to follow him to the source. _She's_ not invited."

"You can't do that!" Patrick planted himself firmly in the aisle. For her part, Ace was struggling for equilibrium. It was true. She _might_ have an Artron energy signature. And he was certainly right about the timing of Britney's capture.

Besides, something about the way he said it got underneath her skin. The scorn and the certainty. _Kill her. You think I didn't know . . ._

Emmett looked as he was about to get up and challenge Chesterford on his feet before he remembered he was restraining Curtis. "You can't just treat a human being like a dowsing rod," he said. "What if he hurts himself, or just keeps walking, or—"

"That's why we're using Curtis. He seems to be in the best shape. Unless he has some hidden handicap, of course, but we can't help that."

Emmett stared at him, mouth open. "You—you can't—that's _sick._ You can't just use human beings as tools, it's not—"

"Right?" Chesterford finished, with a bitter quirk of his mouth.

"Man's got a point, though," Patrick said, sounding like the sentence was getting dragged out of him. "What else are we supposed to do? Sit here and rot in this box?"

Chesterford's eyes widened infinitesimally.

"She'd be alive if it wasn't for you," Emmett said, and rose.

He went toward the back of the coach, toward the emergency exit. Ace tripped him neatly and knelt on top of him just as Curtis, now unrestrained, stepped over her. She tried to grab his ankle, succeeded momentarily, but was thrown off because of the awkwardness of her position.

Chesterford stepped past her, unhurried. Curtis popped the emergency door and disappeared immediately. Chesterford paused on the threshold. "I'd claim I was sorry," he added coolly, "but I'd say it all again in a heartbeat. Word for word. Now, you lot—stay put."

~~~~~~~~

 

"Did I do that?" Patrick said in a tiny voice, after a long moment of silence. He was holding Britney down.

Ace looked up, startled out of memories. _I regret having to say it,_ the Doctor had told her once, at the end of a blistering row (one that went, inevitably, to the same place that most of their rows had gone for a while). _I loathed having to say it. But I can't claim I'm sorry, because given the same pieces in the same places, I would do it all over again. Word for word._

It was, Ace had thought, a chilly and bleak definition of sorry, and she said so. _When humans say it, it doesn't always mean 'I want a take-back.' Sometimes, it just means, 'I know I hurt you.' And sometimes we have to_ hear _that, Professor._

"I don't know," she said slowly. "I think—I _think_ Emmett was afraid of being buried alive. 'You'll feel every worm.' That's what it meant. I wonder . . ."

"Wonder?" Shirin prompted, when Ace didn't go on. If both Patrick and Shirin were thinking a question, Ace had noticed, it was usually Shirin who voiced it. They worked fairly well as a unit, even though she was reasonably sure they'd never met before tonight.

"It's—" Ace looked down at her hands. "It's _difficult,_ sometimes," she said slowly, "ridiculously difficult, to tell when you're being—nudged. Not outright controlled, but steered a little, so that you give the wrong piece of information to the wrong person at very much the wrong time, or say the one thing you shouldn't . . . we're being manipulated. I said that earlier. And I don't think the question is even _how,_ not at this point. It's _how much."_ She shook her head. "We have to watch ourselves. From now on out, we have to really, really watch ourselves."

There was a silence.

"So," Shirin said, this time for all three of them, "what do we do now?"

"I don't know."

"Probably oughtn't admit it, though," Gary said, with the tone of someone who was going to keep a stiff upper lip if it broke his bones. "Not the done thing for an officer."

Ace smiled wanly. "Is that what I am, now? Commander Ace?"

"Ace?"

"Oh, it's sort of—a trade name." It was also what she called herself inside her own head. "From when I was younger. Most people really do call me Dee, nowadays."

"Trade?" Gary inquired.

"You could think of me as a—" This time the smile was a little more genuine. "Dragonslayer."

_"Dragonslayer?"_ Patrick said incredulously.

"Yeah, traveled with a wizard and everything. Figuratively speaking." Ace rubbed the back of her hand over her eyes. This nasty yellow light really was as oppressive, in its own way, as the darkness outside. "Right. I take it that belting them in didn't work." Gary shook his head. "But actually tying them might. So far, everything we've seen the controlled people do is simple stuff. Undoing a buckle, unlatching a door. Listen, Shirin. Do you know what Janine did with the clothes that Brady wee'd on?" Unless it had been Dylan.

"I think she just stuffed them in a corner."

"Okay. Find them. I remember they had elastic braces. We can use elastic braces. Note to self," she went on, in an undertone. "Add rope to jacket supplies. Lots and lots of nice rope."

"'You'll want it, if you haven't got it,'" Gary quoted.

Ace's mouth quirked. "Tolkien?"

"Only fantasy books I've ever read," Gary said, sounding slightly sheepish about it. "It rather put me off, to be honest; decent stuff, but slow and hard to read. I'm beginning to think I should have stuck with it, or got into science fiction." 

"The screwy thing about science fiction is that it's right in all the weird places. Lots of aliens looking like humans, for example. Never did get a straight answer on what that was all about." Shirin had retrieved the braces. "Okay. Let's tie up Britney, then." Ace raised her voice. "Kiddo, if you can hear me, try not to panic. We're not going to hurt you. We're trying to keep the bad guys from getting to you. And someone _is_ going to stay here and stand watch."

Shirin held up the braces gingerly and a bit helplessly. "I don't know any really good knots."

"I do," Patrick said. "Give 'em here."

Gary studied her. "You're going back out."

"Think I have to. Much as I hate to admit it, Chesterford was right about one thing; we _do_ have to know where they're going. And I'm not sure we can trust him to come back and report."

"I'm not sure you can trust him, period," Gary said. It came out rather grim, and Ace raised her eyebrows at him. "The girl was ranting about him, before she ran off to join you. Babbling, mostly. Merritt thought he'd been making advances and tried to stop him from following. Said some things about perverts and jailbait, might have poked him in the chest a few times. Then Chesterford stared him down, which—worked considerably better than you would think, looking at the man. And he said—" Gary shook his head. "I didn't even catch everything he said. Campfire stories, it sounded like. 'There are statues that hunt, and shadows that eat, and I have work to do. Now get out of my way.' I remember that bit. I'm not convinced it's _his_ first rodeo either, and I think he knows rather a lot that he isn't saying and isn't saying what he should. Maybe this thing takes you when you panic, maybe it doesn't, but any idiot should know you don't start telling ghost stories in a crisis in the dark."

"Todd broke right afterwards?" Ace said slowly.

"Pretty near, yes."

_It's listening. Look at the eyes._ Chesterford certainly wasn't going out of his way to be reassuring. It was possible that the thing in the darkness didn't _have_ to turn people into mindless zombies. It was also possible that Chesterford hadn't been what he seemed even before the coach was snatched. He was dressed like an alien who didn't quite _get_ human styles, he had a cold and calculating air about him some of the time, and he had been very deliberately keeping watch on the most dangerous person on board—

And it was possible that such paranoia would destroy them all. 

"Does it mean anything to you," Ace said, "that bit about 'she'd be alive?' Or is that for someone else?"

Gary seemed to shrink a little and developed a sudden fascination with the seat cushion next to him. "My wife committed suicide," he informed it levelly. "Ten years ago. Rather a swing and a miss if it's pushing for panic, but it is the sort of thought one has. Only human."

"I'm sorry." Nothing else she could say, really.

"Yes, well." And that, evidently, was all Gary was comfortable saying about it. "So. Who's searching, and who's guarding, Commander Ace?"

"You and me on search," Ace decided. "Patrick and Shirin on watch."


	5. Chapter 5

The waiting and the hope were conspiring to drive Lree mad.

She was inside the TARDIS, and she was alone. She sat on the edge of the seat and kept her hands clasped tightly together; she'd kept them that way since the Doctor had brought her on board. _It's all right, you know,_ he'd said, _you can't blow up the universe by pushing the wrong button. Except that you could, but it would have to be quite a number of very specific wrong buttons._

He seemed to mean it as reassurance. Possibly he just wasn't used to setting timid entities at ease.

Lree still couldn't sense Ace, despite the fact that the Doctor had taken them back a few hours, before the coach ever left. _Perfectly normal,_ he had said. _The connection needs to be reestablished._ The urge to run out and find Ace, and hold onto her and keep her from boarding the doomed coach, had been almost overwhelming. _I'm trusting you with the most important thing in my life, Lree Gale, because Ace trusts you with hers. Follow my instructions exactly and above all, wait for my call._

Lree waited.

~~~~~~~~

They went in the direction that all the controlled people had set out in. Over rocks, through rocks, past the decaying alien bus.

As they went, Ace started to think the beam of her torch was becoming more and more attenuated. She hoped the effect meant they were going in the right direction, but it still made for a nasty clenching feeling in her chest.

It wasn't the sort of thing an intergalactic dragonslayer should admit, but she was extremely glad to have Gary along. Being alone would have had her jumping at her own shadow. And the man was much better backup—hell, a much better person—than she'd ever expected him to be.

Ace had been in places that were more frightening. She'd been in places that were more inimical to humans. But there was something about this landscape, the endless rocks, the utter lack of any life signs, the smell of rotted things, and above all the oppressive, choking blackness—it sat on a person like a weight. A wind normally made a place feel more alive; the breeze here managed to make it more dead. Ace knew intellectually that a world orbiting a dead sun, in a dead galaxy or a dead universe, would probably freeze her solid in seconds. But that was what this place _felt_ like. Desolate. Hopeless.

At length, Ace's torch flickered and she had to thump it. Gary snapped open his phone without being asked.

She had just started to notice that they were going downhill—she had just chalked another A and an arrow on an outcropping—when the rocks stopped as if someone had gone at the landscape with a giant sander. In front of them was a plain, bare stone like the rest of this place, but level as far as the torch beam carried—which was _definitely_ not as far as it had when they set out.

Ace took a deep breath and moved forward, Gary keeping close by her side.

For a little while, she thought they were approaching a row of standing stones, man-high, laid out in a dead straight line. Then they got closer, and they could see. They were people.

Not just Todd and Curtis. They were the last two, but they weren't alone. There were more people, men and women, a couple of children. They were all entirely hairless and wearing clothes that Ace didn't recognize; not from Earth, she thought.

They weren't turned to stone, or put in stasis. She could see them breathing. But they were just—standing there.

Except for one of the aliens. Ace swept her torch over a gap in the line, and saw a crumpled figure. She wasn't completely sure how to tell age on these people, but when she moved closer, she noticed that the woman's limbs were very thin. _Had been_ very thin, rather. She was dead.

And there, further down the line. There were fifteen aliens, and then after that, evenly spaced—lumps. Crumpled bodies. A closer inspection showed them to be dried, mummy-like, but after seeing the wear on the bus, Ace wasn't prepared to guess how long they'd been here.

"Oh, God," Gary said. He sounded shaken to his core, horrified in a way he hadn't even exhibited when talking about his wife, and Ace didn't blame him. "It just makes them stand here. Until they collapse. Until they die. That's what it does to people."

From here, the expression on the peoples' faces didn't look exactly emotionless. They looked trapped. Not overtly horrified, but the sort of dull suffering of someone who has nothing left. Ace had seen the look before, on slaves' faces. Or prisoners.

She rummaged in her pocket for her thermos. "What," she whispered, not taking her eyes off the standing figures, "is the _point_ of this? What's it for?" She poured a tiny bit of water onto her fingers and dabbed it across the lips of one of the alien children, hoping she would lick her lips in reflex.

Nothing.

"Maybe," Gary said, "there isn't a point."

"Everything has a point."

"Are you sure? Maybe this place doesn't do this to people because it needs to. Maybe it does it just to be cruel. Maybe it wants to take bets on how long it'll take us to starve. Maybe we mean _nothing_ to it. It's powerful and we're small, so it arranges us like so many chess pieces and doesn't even care."

Ace turned around, very quickly, and stared at him. "Why not dominoes."

Gary had been staring at Todd's face as if he couldn't look away. He looked sideways at her, jolted by her tone. "What?"

"Lined up, evenly spaced, _single file._ Like dominoes; anyone would think dominoes. Only you said chess pieces. Do you know why?" She didn't bother to wait for an answer. "Listen, you," she went on, not sure if she was talking to the people in line or the surrounding darkness. "You think you can get inside my head. And guess what? You're right. You can see my memories. You know what makes me afraid, what makes me doubt. But don't think for a moment that you can _rule_ me with it. If you're smart, you'll let these people go and transport us all back to Earth and skulk off back where you came from, before I start getting annoyed."

Silence. No response.

"You think," Gary said unsteadily, "it made me say—"

And that was when all the people in the line opened their mouths and spoke in unison. _"She'd be alive if it wasn't for you."_

Ace skipped backwards in startlement, hand going to her pocket and the handle of her bat. "Gary, don't listen to it."

_"She'd be alive if it wasn't for you."_

"Shut it, you! Gary, you have to listen to me. You have to ignore them—"

_"She'd be alive if it wasn't for you."_

"Oi, I said _shut_ it! Gary, it's not true. This thing is lying to you. That's what it does, that's how it gets to you. You have to—"

_"She'd be alive if it wasn't for you."_

"Kill her," Gary said, and stepped forward to join the line.

~~~~~~~~

Ace stared at him for an instant, feeling as if the bottom had dropped out of her stomach—not just dread, but gnawing horrible helplessness. "No," she said, and then, "No! Gary! Snap out of it!" She rushed over to him. "You're stronger than this, dammit, you can do this, now fight it off! _Fight. It._ Come on, Gary!"

Nothing. Even his eyes weren't tracking.

"Oh, you do not want me to try hurting you to break you loose, because I can do it. Now come on!"

_"Kill her,"_ the line said.

Ace punched Gary in the solar plexus.

He staggered back, but he didn't double over as much as he should have. And he stepped back in line immediately. She hit him again. She _had_ to be hurting him. If pain was enough to break him free, it would happen. She shoved him backwards, not letting him step back into place.

_"Kill her."_

Only it wasn't doing any good, because Gary still hadn't shown any reaction. He just tried to move forward, blindly and steadily, to get back to his spot at the end of the line. His face had that trapped look to it, and Ace thought he might be feeling the pain. It just wasn't working.

_"Kill her."_

"You think I didn't know?" Todd added.

_"Kill her."_

"You think I didn't know?" This time it came from one of the aliens. His voice sounded as dry and cracked as dead leaves.

"No," Ace snarled, "never. _Never,_ do you understand?"

_"Kill her."_

"You think I didn't know?

"I knew she carried the evil inside her."

_"Kill her."_

"If you don't think I'm capable of carting everyone back to the coach, tying them up, and keeping them alive as long as it takes, you obviously aren't a very good mind reader!" She was bluffing, of course. Utterly out of cards. Yes, she might be able to get the controlled people back to the bus, but what then? She'd run out of water soon enough. There was nowhere to go.

"I knew she carried the evil inside her."

"You think I didn't know?"

_"Kill her."_

"Right. Don't say I didn't warn you." Ace knelt and slung the smaller of the two alien children across her shoulder. Even when you didn't know what to do, you had to look out for the kids. It was a rule.

_"Kill her."_ The child didn't stop talking because Ace had taken her out of line. Before, the zombies had only talked when they were first taken; now, you couldn't shut them up.

Ace wondered if it was getting stronger.

"I _will_ be back." She wished she didn't sound so high-pitched and alone. She wished that her retreat back towards the stones didn't feel so much like fleeing in defeat.

~~~~~~~~

It took her a while to find her arrow and A marking; it wasn't quite where she thought she'd put it. She searched very deliberately, crushing the fear as much as possible. No panic. She would _not_ panic.

She was, however, getting tired. The little girl might have been the smaller of the two children, but she wasn't exactly light. Every now and then, she would say, "Kill her," or, "You think I didn't know?" She had a high, very young-sounding voice.

Ace wondered what the rust effect would do to people, if anything. Was she going to come out of this with white hair? (Was she going to come out of this?) What about Nisha? What would it do to Nisha?

Was the leaden feeling of her limbs a sign that the place was starting to affect her more?

She wove through the rocks. Horrible, awful, _nasty_ landscape, like the incarnation of Gary's fears, that the point of it all was pointless sadism. Ragged and uneven, impossible to walk comfortably on, striving to trip you at every opportunity. And the smell. Ace seemed to remember hearing that naturally mummified bodies didn't smell like much of anything, so where was the smell coming from? Was it a form of subtle somatic torture? Was it built into the place?

Her torch didn't seem to be getting brighter as she got away from the line.

Ace wondered where Chesterford had got to. He hadn't been in the line, they hadn't found him or met him along the way. Either he'd abandoned Curtis, and everyone else in the line, or he was up to something worse. Either way, when Ace found him, they were going to have words.

Not that she could think what to say to him right now. And if he was a tool of this place, if he was the thing that had brought them here, he had no reason to let himself be found. Why bother? She hadn't even managed to disrupt anything.

God, she was tired. And thirsty. And her eyes were blurring. She had to save the water for the children, though. Buying time. Keeping them alive so she could think of something. (What?) If you didn't have anything up your sleeve, you stalled, because the universe was chaotic and wild and might serve up something you could use. Fortune favored whoever could grab hold of it and hang on. That was how it worked.

Anywhere else, Ace would have thought about waiting for daybreak. But she very much doubted this place had any. It didn't _feel_ like a daylight sort of place. She plodded around one of her marked stones, shifting the girl awkwardly on her shoulder.

And then she heard voices. One voice, in particular. She hurried forward.

Patrick had been taken. And Shirin. And because it had got _them,_ Emmett and Janine were free to walk to the line as well. Emmett, Janine and Patrick were all shambling steadily forward, eyes fixed front. Chesterford was holding Shirin against a rock.

"—surrender," he was saying, as Ace came towards him. "Completely. Unconditionally. Believe me, it's your only change at survival. You have, oh—" He broke off as he caught sight of Ace. "Five minutes," Chesterford finished quietly. "And thirty-five seconds." She noticed that as he spoke, he was toying with something silvery, but he managed to make it vanish before she could see the details. He'd left his tweed jacket somewhere. And he hadn't bothered retrieving his torch.

It wasn't positive proof that he didn't need light to see by, but in her current state of mind, Ace wasn't inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. _"You. Miserable. Creep."_

His mouth quirked. Despite his overwhelming victory, it wasn't a happy expression. "You might as well give up now and spare yourself a bit of heartache. I really don't want to torture you more than necessary."

_"Drop dead,_ toerag." Ace put the alien child down and pulled her bat out of her jacket. Chesterford was human enough, or at least physical enough, to take a few long steps back. "Let them go. Let them _all_ go. Or else—"

"Or else what? You'll beat me to death? You don't have it in you. And besides, I'm not your biggest problem. Your biggest problem is what you'll find, or rather, who you _won't_ find, back on the coach."

Ace froze. She felt something dark and sticky and nasty hit her mind and shove, like being assaulted by tar. She used anger to beat it back, but she was sickly aware that fury would burn out fast, like a flaming torch.

"All you accomplished tonight," Chesterford added softly, "was to abandon your daughter, alone in the dark, with me. You'll never see her again. Not—" He seemed to take great care in selecting the next word, like a meticulous butcher choosing exactly the right instrument. "Intact."

Ace didn't spare a thought for the alien child. She didn't even bother to curse. She just sprinted past him.

This time, it felt as if she were struggling against the darkness itself, and not just the roughness of the land. It was like running through cobwebs, if cobwebs were heavy and seemed to sap your strength whenever they touched you. It took her several hideous moments to get to the coach, and when she did, she barely saw it. She almost ran into its side.

She barely saw it because it was barely lit. There was one light, the color of a rotten tooth, shining resentfully through one window. All the others had gone out.

Including the children's lights.

She muttered, "No," and dashed up the three stairs into the coach, heart screaming. It wasn't because it couldn't be because it shouldn't be because _Nisha wasn't gone, dammit._

The twins were. Their spaces were empty. Ace stumbled, catching herself on one of the seats, as she made her way towards the back. Towards the one remaining light. And then she nearly tripped on Britney, who had wiggled her way out of her spot and was crawling, legs still bound, towards the front of the bus. Britney moaned, "Mnn _nnnr_ -nnn!" at Ace, but Ace was beyond caring. She was almost certainly saying, _please help me,_ and Ace couldn't.

She couldn't. She couldn't help anyone.

Every single thing she'd tried had failed. She tried to tell herself that Nisha couldn't be gone, she couldn't have just left her helpless and asleep, with two vulnerable and doomed innocents to guard her. But she couldn't lie to herself. It was fact. There were Nisha's glasses, lying neatly folded on her seat.

Ace closed her eyes and felt the tears form, and the blackness took her mind in a great wave.

~~~~~~~~

_"Kneel if you want the girl to live!"_

Ace was distantly aware of walking robot-like towards the coach exit. She was even aware of stepping on Britney's hand as she went, but that was a minor jolt of guilt compared to the storm in her head.

_"Kill her."_

In her head, she was back there. In her head, she could smell smoke and the decayed fish-scent of haemovores. And there was wild, evil laughter and utter, disbelieving shock: he hadn't just said that. He _couldn't_ have just said that. She must have misheard it somehow.

_"The Time Lord finally understands!"_

_"You think I didn't know?"_ He didn't even sound angry. Angry was for people, and—his withering tone made it plain—she wasn't. She was a stain on his shoe. She was garbage. _"The chessboard in Lady Painforte's study? I knew."_

Down the steps and outside, as the memory gloated and grinned, and detailed how it had been with her all along, and the Doctor— _her Professor_ —answered without a flicker of any emotion beyond contempt. _"I knew. I knew she carried the evil inside her. Do you think I'd have chosen a social misfit if I hadn't known?"_

As if she were filth.

_"She couldn't even pass her chemistry exams at school, and yet she manages to create a time storm in her bedroom? I saw your hand in it from the very beginning."_

As if she were nothing.

_"You're an emotional cripple."_ He looked back to Fenric. _"I wouldn't waste my time with her. Unless I had to use her somehow."_

Ace couldn't control her own body. But in her mind, she looked up at the dead sky, and filled her lungs, and bellowed, _"Yes! He said it!"_

The blackness in her mind faltered. So did her footsteps.

_"He said it,"_ she went on, trying to _slam_ her words into the sticky, smothering malevolence. _"And I believed it. And that saved the world. It saved everything. Do you really think I can't take a black moment for the sake of the_ universe? _Who do you think I am?"_

She slowed. And halted. The blackness bore down on her, a cacophony of _kill her_ and _social misfit_ and _I wouldn't waste my time._ Ace shoved back. _"I,_ " she screamed inside her head, _"am! Ace! And I'm not giving up!"_

"Last chance," Chesterford said.

He was leaning against a rock, looking casual and composed, but Ace thought there was a rising energy to him all the same. Perhaps something about his eyes. Or perhaps it was the light. Whatever he was using—the silver rod, Ace thought, but she couldn't move her eyes enough to look at it—glowed pale green. He flipped it end-over-end, and the shadows surged and retreated across his face.

She wrestled with the blackness. She couldn't move her lips, but she managed to mumble, "Nnn nng nn gnnnd, nnnrg," and hoped her tone was clear enough that he could fill in appropriate words himself.

"I wasn't talking to you, McShane."

Ace blinked. On her own.

"Although, while I have you on the line, I should probably tell you. I _am_ sorry." A brief, sad smile. "I'm reliably informed that it's important. And I'm not saying it even the tiniest bit so that you won't punch me in the face, which I have to admit, I may possibly have coming."

Ace managed, "Nrr?" What was he talking about?

He pointed at her sharply. "But! I was talking to the dolorovore." He cocked his head, considering. "Dolorovore. Do we like that word? It's either a very cool name or an absolutely rubbish one . . . dolorovore. Dolorrrovorrre—no," he made a bizarre grimace, running his tongue over his teeth, "it's just not the same with this mouth."

What?

"Despair-eater, whatever the name. Lurking in the black between the stars, binding people up, like a spider, and draining them slowly. And oh, you're powerful so long as you're in your little sphere, so long as you control the environment—so long as you have people trapped. You just have to wait." He stepped away from the rock. He was speaking faster now, a more forceful cadence. "But you forgot something. You forgot that there are many kinds of power in this universe. There are beings whose minds can reach for light years, but can barely swat a fly. And then there are beings who can't always sense an ordinary human in the next room—but if you're thick enough to confront them inside _their_ brain, on _their_ territory, then. You. Lose." He smiled, or at least made a smile-shaped expression with his lips. "Would you care to guess which sort of mind you just jumped into?"

Ace threw herself against the blackness, the emotional equivalent of a shoulder-check. _"Not giving up!"_ It came out, "Nnnrgrn!" _"You can't have despair if I never give up!"_

"Of course," Chesterford went on, "she can't hold you off forever. No-one can. _Fighting_ despair is, ultimately, a stopgap. But there are more potent forces in this universe than fighting." He paced to a halt, only a few feet in front of Ace. "You know what they say." A more genuine smile. "It's all about who you know."

The blackness—the dolorovore—surged towards _him._ With a mental snarl. It was, Ace thought, the equivalent of screaming, _shut up! Just shut up!_

She summoned a burst of determination, trying to weaken the thing. To divert its lunge. Chesterford was standing up to the dark, and that was enough to put him on her side, despite multiplying questions. Who was he? _What_ was he? Was she just imagining it, or was he saying things that—

She didn't have the speed, or perhaps the mental leverage, to stymie the dolorovore completely. She saw, as well as felt, the mental attack land.

Chesterford staggered, face contorting in sudden anguish, but he didn't fall. "Ian," he said hoarsely, "Chesterton."

Ace was quite, quite sure he'd introduced himself as Chesterford. The dolorovore coiled itself and lashed out again.

"Barbara Wright." He closed his eyes like a man about to pray and tilted his head back, spreading his arms slightly. When he spoke again, it was more like a chant. "Ian-Chesterton-Barbara-Wright-Vicki-Pallister-Steven-Taylor—"

Not just a chant. _The_ chant.

Oh, god. It was _that same chant._

A memory of a conversation, some time after the event: _"Professor? What_ did _you use to hold off the haemovores? What do you have that much faith in?"_

A pause; she thought for a moment he wasn't going to answer at all. He danced around so many other personal questions. But finally, he gave her his best I-have-a-secret smile, and said, _"Names."_

_"What, like, names from Time Lord history? Rassilon, Omega . . ."_

_"No."_ His tone said, _don't be silly. "Names of power. Important names."_

He'd never elaborated. But this was it, this was the chant that the Doctor had used in nineteen forty-five to hold haemovores at bay, the words that held faith strong enough to make vampires cower—or dolorovores. There was only one person who'd know about it. There was only one person who'd _believe_ in it, who'd be able to use it.

He'd been dropping clues all along. Deliberately, with the certainty that she wouldn't assemble them until he gave her the critical piece. Rolled r's. Apologies. Even mentioning his loathing of bus stations, _to Britney,_ with a little offhand bit of reverse psychology to make sure she passed it on to Ace if she didn't take his offer of sleep. Oh, that was familiar, so very familiar. Ace would never be a chess master herself, but she knew enough to recognize a playing style.

She felt dizzy. Light-headed. Her mouth was hanging open. A rush of hope, all scrambled up with fear that it wasn't, because it was clearly impossible and rising joy, because impossible had never, ever applied, and _what_ and _how_ and _am I dreaming?_ He was shouting the names now. Melodramatic, over-the-top—that was familiar too, the attitude of a performer. "Liz Shaw! Jo Grant! Sarah Jane Smith! Brigadier! Alastair! Gordon! Lethbridge-Stewart!"

Who Ace had _met._ And she'd heard of Jo Grant; never met her, but she'd seen one of her protests on some BBC news program and thought, _interesting. She's got the Look._

Ordinary human names. Names of power. They were _traveling companions._

The realization, the sudden totality of everything that _meant,_ hit Ace like an ocean wave. The dolorovore's sticky tendrils weren't controlling her at all, now, but she was too shocked to move. "You," she whispered, as he bellowed names at the sky, "you—you're— _you are fucking kidding me."_

"Nyssa of Traken! Tegan Jovanka! Vislor Turlough!" His voice had risen even more. _"Perpugilliam Brown! Melanie Bush!"_

And then he stopped. And opened his eyes. And _paused,_ for a long and unbearable moment, before stepping forward and tweaking her nose. "Ace," the Doctor whispered, "McShane."

Everything went white.


	6. Chapter 6

One moment, her mind was a writhing tangle of _useless_ and _lazy_ and _is this why I put food on your plate,_ accompanied by agony from her injured hand. Then there was a pulse of pure emotion, and Britney was free.

She spent a moment just gasping for air. That flare, that overwhelming flash of _feeling,_ so strong she could almost see by the light of it—like waking up on Christmas morning, or watching a movie that had wrung your feelings dry and then made everything _right_ again in a stroke, or seeing a loved one you thought you'd lost. For an instant—just one instant—Britney felt like her gran had come back to comfort her.

Then she sat up. She had to tell Ms. McShane.

Shirin had been taken an instant before Chesterford boarded the coach. Britney, drowning in darkness, hadn't been able to turn her head, but she heard the clunk of feet on the steps. "No quip for me, then?" Chesterford said, and there was something about his voice that made ice run up Britney's spine. "Not even a _molto bené_ in honor of Midnight?" Britney could hear the smile in his voice, edged and narrow. "You can't read me, can you? Or perhaps you can see, but you don't comprehend. You look inside me and you see chaos, and impossibility, and moments that never were. You don't know who I am. You don't know what I am. Does that frighten you?" His voice dropped to a near-whisper. _"Because it should."_

Even through the despair, Britney felt her heart spasm. Chesterford came forward, crossing her line of sight.

The next moment, he moved back, carrying Manisha gently in both arms. It made Britney's skin crawl, the tenderness of it, from someone—something?—more deadly than any snake. Whatever he wanted Manisha for, it was worse than petty human evil. She knew it. She could feel the danger of him, like a knot in her stomach.

He descended the coach steps and was gone for a moment. Then he came back in and made two more trips, one for each of the boys.

And then he came back in and pointed some sort of wand at each of the children's three bulbs, in turn, and they switched themselves neatly off. All the lights were gone except Ms. McShane's, burning on by itself.

He left. Britney lay there being useless and pointless. Until, miraculously, she wasn't.

She didn't bother to question her good fortune. She just had to get out and warn Ms. McShane.

 

~~~~~~~~

When the world came back, Ace was slumped against the Doctor. He was holding her up, or hugging her, or both. She had tears on her cheeks, leaking into his cotton shirt, and, oh, the _smell_ was right. Not human body odor, not the inexplicably lemony scent of a Trelm, but the very faint trace scent of a Time Lord.

"Ace." His voice was very quiet, very gentle. "Are you all right?"

She swallowed and pushed herself upright, struggling to make her voice steady. "How. What." The words weren't even remotely adequate. "How."

A brief quirk of a smile. "How what?"

_"Professor!"_ She closed her eyes and shook her head. "This—this is _surreal._ What happened? Where did you put Manisha? How . . . how, how _this?"_

He didn't let her go, but he drew away enough to study her. "I told you that Time Lords change faces. Must've done. Ancelyn mentioned it."

Ace paused, searching her memory. "What you said," she said finally, "was, 'Life is change. The price of great longevity is someday not recognizing yourself in the mirror. If one is very, very lucky, it's literal rather than figurative.' And that isn't an explanation _of anything,_ and besides, it's not just your face. You're _tall._ You're not Scottish anymore." That last sentence came out sounding surprisingly forlorn.

"Technically, to be Scottish, I'd have to be from Earth—"

"Professor. You know what I mean."

"Well, yes. Words taste different to different mouths, that's all. It just didn't—fit, anymore. Although I did try being Northern for a while, that was interesting. I noticed that people tended to—"

_"Ms. McShane!"_

It was Britney. She'd divested herself of the elastic and was coming down the bus steps, holding Ace's torch awkwardly in her left hand—holding her right hand as if it was injured. Ace couldn't really tell if she was paler than usual, not in this light, but her face looked pinched with pain. She flinched as the Doctor held up his light. "He moved Manisha," Britney babbled. "He did it, he moved Manisha and the twins, carried them out of the coach—"

"Let me see that hand," the Doctor said, moving forward.

Britney backed away. "And then," she went on, "he put out all the other lights with that—that—"

"Screwdriver," the Doctor said, "now let me _see_ it." Britney's shoulders had bumped up against the bus, stopping her retreat. The Doctor examined her thumb, then waved the sonic screwdriver up and down her body—when had he started putting scanners in those? Or, for that matter, changed the light to green? "Dislocated thumb," he said. "Everything else is superficial. Britney—I need you to trust me."

Britney looked past him to Ace, looking as if she wanted Ace to rescue her from lions. "Do it," Ace said. "Trust him. It's okay."

"But he—he—" Britney looked as if her last source of hope had pointed a gun at her.

"I know him from way back. I just didn't recognize him. Britney, listen, he needs to pop your thumb back into joint, and he'd prefer to get into your head and stop you from feeling it. Believe me, it's better that way."

"But he was _doing_ it all. Don't—don't you remember, about Manisha, and—"

"Not everything," the Doctor said.

Ace clasped Britney's shoulder in what she hoped was a comforting way. "It's all right. I'm _fine._ I'm not under control, I remember all of it." She paused, gathering her thoughts. "Okay, here's how it is. There are creatures that live off emotion, yeah? The one that lived here ate despair. This whole place was set up as a sort of a trap, designed to be hostile and upsetting and wear us down, and once it got to someone it would take these little emotional jabs at the rest, just to soften us up. Now, the Professor—him—"

"I'm the Doctor," the Doctor told Britney. From the expression on Britney's face as she looked between the two of them, she didn't find it much of a clarification.

"He knew a lot of this going in," Ace said. "He knew he was going to have to pin the monster down, and the best way to do that was to trick it inside my head, because he knew I would put up a fight. Hold it in place while he hit it, sort of. The only problem is, it couldn't take me until I had a moment of despair. So he gave me one. Deliberately, on purpose, knowing how much it was going to hurt—because that was the best way to save us all."

Despite the young face, the Doctor managed somehow to look extremely old when she said that. "You don't have to forgive me for it," he said quietly.

"I know, but I can choose to. And I will, because you kept the children safe. That was the point of it, wasn't it? Putting them in a deep sleep so that the thing couldn't get into their minds."

"Yes."

"Thought so." Ace turned back to Britney. "See, here's the thing. It worked. The creature jumped into my brain. The Doctor overwhelmed it with faith."

"No, I didn't," the Doctor said.

"What?"

"It wasn't feeding off _me._ I—did what I did—because I knew you'd recognize it. And from that, you'd know who I am. You fed it an instant of pure hope, and it burned up like a leaf in a supernova. All," he tapped her nose, "you."

"Oh," Ace said faintly. After all this time, with a different face and a different voice, he could still do it to her. Make her feel important, _brilliant,_ like a champion of truth and justice. She found herself smiling, the old delighted smile from the old days.

The Doctor grinned back. "Right!" He spun around, taking in the surroundings in a quick, slightly awkward sort of pirouette. "Lots to do. Britney, if you won't let me see to your thumb, at least sit down and do your best not to jar it. And give me that torch." He appropriated the torch and did something to the bulb with the sonic screwdriver. The torch flared like burning magnesium.

Britney squeaked, jumped, and then hissed through her teeth.

The Doctor set the torch on the ground, pointing upward. "Hah! Look at that." He pointed at the sky.

Or rather, pointed at the _ceiling._ They were in a vast cavern.

"Hollow asteroid," the Doctor said. "Spun for false gravity. That's just one of the reasons that you lot feel uncomfortable here; this place is just a bit too small for that trick to work perfectly. Your feet are out of sync with your head." He moved over to the luggage compartment and unlatched it.

Ace followed him. "You stuffed the children in a luggage compartment." She came up in time to see the Doctor pick up a key and do something to it with the sonic screwdriver.

"Slight perception filter," he explained, waggling the key and then putting it in his breast pocket. "The same reason people generally don't disturb the TARDIS." The three children were curled up under the Doctor's jacket. Dylan, or possibly Brady, was clinging to one of the sleeves as if it were a teddy bear. The Doctor leaned forward, touched his forehead, and whispered something in his ear.

Dylan stirred and opened his eyes. "H'lo," he said.

The Doctor beamed at him and reclaimed his jacket. "Hello yourself."

"Yes," Ace said, "but you stuffed the _children_ in a _luggage compartment."_

"Well, it's not as if there were a lot of other places to put them." The Doctor woke Brady (or possibly Dylan) the same way, with a touch and some sort of murmured trigger phrase. "The perception filter probably wouldn't have worked on you; the TARDIS is used to letting you through. And besides, I wasn't just hiding them from _you._ Despair is low-energy fare; a dolorovore is a lazy sort of predator, more like a crocodile or a trap-door spider than a falcon or a panther. I was hoping that, like a crocodile, the dolorovore was just a bit thick."

He leaned down and whispered in Nisha's ear. She yawned, then blinked her eyes open.

"Welcome back," the Doctor said.

"Oh!" Nisha sounded surprised.

"Oh?"

"I wasn't sure it was going to work. You said there would be a countdown in my head, but I didn't hear anything. Hi, Mum."

Ace grinned. "Hi, midget."

Nisha refocused on the Doctor. "Mister Chesterford—"

"No," the Doctor said, "not exactly. Extremely very much not exactly, in fact, but go on."

Nisha wasn't going to be diverted. "You said," she reminded him, "that you'd explain everything later."

"Yes, I did."

"And now it's later. So you _ought_ to explain."

Ace grinned even wider. "She's got a point, Professor."

"Ganged up on by McShanes," the Doctor said. "Now _that's_ terrifying. Ace, why don't you get Manisha's glasses?" He ducked out of the luggage compartment, straightened up, and produced a mobile phone from some pocket.

"What're you doing?" And when had he started carrying a phone? Not, Ace expected, that he answered it unless he ruddy well felt like—he had an almost feline distaste for being at anyone's beck and call—but it seemed like a peculiar concession to modernity, especially coming from a man who had always carried a pocket watch that he didn't need.

The Doctor beamed. "Phoning home." He punched buttons, rather too many for a normal phone number. "Lree Gale! Time for your part. Type ts=0 to activate the homing program. When all seven indicators are blue, and _only_ then, use the lever I showed you to start dematerialization . . ."

"What's he doing?" Nisha whispered.

The Doctor waved his hands quite a lot when he talked, now. It looked a bit ridiculous when he was on the phone. "I'm not sure," Ace said, watching him, "but it sounds like—"

And then she heard It. Not _quite_ like a machine, not _quite_ like an animal, and not quite like ocean waves, but exactly the sound of the strings of space and time being scraped against and elbowed aside by an elderly police box.

~~~~~~~~

The first thing that happened when the TARDIS landed was that Lree ran out and embraced Ace as if she wanted to hug her for days. "I couldn't feel you at all," she told Ace, voice muffled by Ace's shoulder. "I thought you were dead, I used the psychic transmitter from the attic but I didn't know at first that it even worked . . ."

"Mums!" Nisha said (it was her name for Lree, to distinguish her from "Mum," meaning Ace) and rushed up for her own hug.

Lree let go of Ace long enough to cuddle her for a moment. "I was worried," she whispered. "I was so worried—"

Underneath the words, Ace could feel the gentle brush of her mind, Lree reassuring herself that Ace and Nisha were really alive and really here. Reestablishing the connection, Ace supposed.

Which had to have been lost when—oh. _Oh._ "You're doubled back on yourself," Ace said to the Doctor. "Aren't you. _That's_ why you couldn't just let the dolorovore into your own mind and beat it there. I had to lose my link with Lree so that you could get the call and know I was in trouble."

"You figured that out a lot faster than I did," Lree said.

"Yeah, I'm kind of used to it."

The Doctor raised his trace eyebrows. "What makes you think that I'd have the slightest chance of defeating that creature inside _my_ mind?"

Lree stared at him. "But—you're—"

Ace wondered what had gone on between the two of them. He'd evidently over-awed Lree somehow. But then, Lree tended to be shy of people in authority, and the Doctor generally operated on the assumption that _doctor_ outranked _emperor._

"The dolorovore catches you when you give up, and then uses all your bleakest memories to hold you." The Doctor smiled in a way that was probably intended to convey, _oh, it's all right, I'm over it,_ and somehow came out precisely the opposite. "I'm a thousand and sixty-two. I've had a bit of time to accumulate baggage. Think about it." He looked awkward. "There's the loop, too, of course."

"You're blue," Dylan accused, staring at Lree. Who, Ace noticed belatedly, wasn't using her shimmerfield. The boy looked at the Doctor. "She's blue."

"You're pink," the Doctor said.

Dylan looked down at his arm critically. "Am not. I'm _toast-_ colored."

He had a point. Ace went over to help Britney back to her feet and found the girl staring at Lree too. "She's an alien," Britney said faintly.

"Yeah. That's my wife, Lree Gale. Or Laurie Gale if you can't pronounce the other. She's a Trelm. Come on, let's get you fixed up."

"Wife?" Britney looked startled. "You're—" She faltered, realizing belatedly that there was no way to finish that sentence which didn't get far too personal.

Ace decided to bail her out. "Married? Yeah. I just don't wear my ring because it'd snag on things in a fight. Come on."

Getting Britney into the TARDIS involved more diplomacy than Ace had expected. The twins were delighted by it, especially with Nisha keeping up an excited narrative of all the marvelous things inside it: " . . . a lab'ratory and a garden and a swimming pool and a library with _all the good books ever_ and . . ." Britney took one look inside, backed out, and fled back to the steps of the coach, where she sat down and hugged her knees awkwardly with one arm.

Ace followed and sat down beside her. "Britney," she said, "kiddo, it's all right. Honestly. The TARDIS would never hurt you. I know; I used to live there."

"It's—" Britney said, and licked her lips. "It's bigger—"

"On the inside, yeah. Just like my pockets. Listen, there's a sickbay in there. You look like hell; that thumb's got to be killing you." She looked down. "I'm sorry about that—well, only sort of, because it wasn't _me,_ but—"

Britney shook her head. "I don't want—" She scrunched up her shoulders as if she were trying to disappear inside herself, like a tortoise. "I don't want—him—"

_"I_ can use the stuff in the sickbay," Ace said. "He doesn't have to come near you." She could vouch for the Professor's character later, when the girl was in less pain.

When Ace herded Britney through the doorway again, she stopped for a moment herself. He'd redecorated. Even the light was different, orange-yellow rather than slightly antiseptic white. Did the TARDIS change to match _him?_ And if so, how different was he, inside?

Time enough for that later.

"He's not human, is he?" Britney said, as Ace led her into the clinic. It was nearly a whisper.

"No. He's a Time Lord." The organization of the clinic hadn't changed that much; it only took Ace three drawers to find the microstunner. "Which is, yes, a kind of alien. They're extremely advanced, and _he's_ smart enough to run rings around almost everybody. Though I've never been sure if he's a normal Time Lord or not; he can get pretty mysterious when he wants to be."

"If he can—what's that?"

"It's called a microstunner. Sort of like a local anaesthetic, but it's a blue light instead of an injection. Hold still . . ." Just to be sure, Ace numbed her from the wrist down.

"He can get inside peoples' heads," Britney said.

"Yeah. But you'll notice, he did ask you for permission."

Britney shook her head. "He knew that I'm running away, he knew that my father—" She made that tortoise-y gesture with her shoulders again.

"Hey. Hey, it's all right. Listen, my mother wasn't exactly Parent of the Year material either. I get it. You don't have to talk about it." Ace fitted a skeleto-muscular reconstruction glove over Britney's hand and winced slightly at the noise it made popping her thumb back where it should be. The light on the top of the glove turned blue an instant later—a simple dislocated joint was ridiculously trivial compared to the sort of damage the glove could handle—and Ace unfastened it as delicately as she could.

"It's mostly _me,"_ Britney said, in a rush. "It's—I've never been any good at anything, I always get into trouble, I do things I know I shouldn't, like drinking and smoking and—and, y'know, going out with the boys—and he'll hurt me, he'll really _hurt_ me, if he finds out—" She clamped her mouth shut. "But," she went on after a moment, _"he_ read it right out of my mind."

Ace shook her head. "No, he didn't. He doesn't need to. He deduced it, Sherlock Holmes style. From what you're wearing, from the bag you got on the bus with, maybe even from the way you move. Which is, yeah, kind of intimidating if you stop and really ponder it, but after a while you just sort of get used to the idea that he knows things."

"But, how do you _know_ that he isn't just making you think that he's—I mean, if he can get in peoples' heads, if he can make people do things, then you'd never really know. You could never really be _sure._ I mean, you could go on for years thinking that you're all right, thinking you're free, and then—"

"You're right," Ace said after a moment. "You can never be really, truly, a hundred percent sure. Here, hold this under your tongue until it dissolves."

"What is it?"

"Nanites in a pill. They filter into your bloodstream through your mouth, seek out injured tissue, and fix it. They also have the most godawful fake cherry flavoring you've ever tasted, I think so little kids don't spit them out. So, be warned."

Britney put it in her mouth, gingerly.

"But," Ace said, picking up where she'd left off, "here's the thing. If I spent my time wondering if I had a thought because it was mine, or because a telepath put it in my head, I'd go insane—because as soon as I decide that the thought is mine, I'd have to wonder if a telepath made me think _that._ Eventually, you have to just stop worrying about it, trust your friends, and go on with your life." Britney looked uncertain. "Besides. If the Professor were going to make adjustments to my brain, I think he would have tampered with some of the decisions I made when I was young. Like bunging a decent-sized brick of elemental potassium into a loo."

"What does that do?"

"The potassium goes away."

"Oh."

"So does the loo." Ace mimed a large, hazardous, and ultimately extremely damp explosion with her hands. "You think _you're_ a delinquent; you should hear some of the things I got up to. Here, let me wrap that hand up so you won't move it." Britney held her hand out. Ace bandaged it. "Now, let's get back to the console room and see what the Professor's up to."

~~~~~~~~

As it turned out, the Doctor had elected to wait for Patrick and Shirin's party by the coach, counting on Ace's supercharged torch to show them the way.

Patrick was carrying the alien girl on his back. Shirin was walking close beside him, with Emmett on the other side of her. Janine was keeping her distance from the lot of them.

Janine was also the first into the TARDIS, and her ensuing meltdown meant that it took some delicate negotiations to get the rest of them inside. Delicate negotiations handled by Ace, since Patrick, Emmett and Shirin all made it perfectly clear that they trusted the Doctor as far as they could drop-kick him. His demand for the dolorovore to surrender (delivered through Shirin) and his later request that they look after the alien girl after they were freed—those just served to drive home how much he knew that he wasn't telling.

The girl, whose name turned out to be Nine Bird Scarlet, accepted what she was seeing with wide eyes. She had, it seemed, been taken only a little while ago when she saw a blue light bobbing towards her; blue was bad luck on her world, the color of ghosts and death. Ace rather suspected that the light had been Britney's phone. The girl _had_ claimed to see something move out near the plastic bus. Perhaps she wasn't overly timid so much as compulsively alert. Or, perhaps, the dolorovore hadn't been above concocting phantoms to drive people like Britney and Nine Bird Scarlet closer to the edge.

As soon as he got them all on board, the Doctor shut the doors firmly and rushed over to the console. Janine was still trying to get her boys back so that they could get out of "this, this-this-this _place."_ The boys, for their part, were exploring, rushing around at a pace that implied someone had set their trousers on fire. The rather hard lurch of takeoff staggered everyone else, startling a scream out of Janine and a rather high-pitched oath out of Emmett, but the boys barely noticed.

They materialized only a few feet from where the line had been. Most of the aliens had collapsed from sheer exhaustion when they were released, apparently. Gary had deputized himself to make them comfortable, appropriating Todd's jumper and the jacket of Curtis's uniform as improvised blankets. When Ace emerged from the TARDIS, he closed his eyes for an instant in utter relief. "What happened?"

"A monster annoyed McShane," the Doctor explained, "and then exploded. Perfectly normal phenomenon, happens all the time. There's probably a support group. The support group is probably on fire."

The aliens—they called themselves the Kshan—were largely too exhausted to protest that the TARDIS was impossible. Curtis gaped, then shut his mouth with a snap and didn't say anything for quite a while, although he kept shooting unsettled glances at the Doctor and Ace both. Gary boggled visibly, but recovered enough to ask the Doctor whether there might be a kettle so that he could fix tea for the Kshan.

The Doctor grinned. "Oh, I _love_ English coping skills. Especially with milk and sugar. No, they can't have tea; they can't have caffeine at all. Down the corridor to the left, right, right again, first door past the spiral staircase—that's the kitchen. Ignore the balloons and the plague of origami frogs. I _think_ you'll find a full jug of fruit juice in the icebox, but if you don't, there's water. And some bread, and a jar of honey. Nothing more involved than that for the moment, I think; their stomachs will need some time to recover."

"There's _more_ of this place?"

"Gary," the Doctor said patiently, "have _you_ ever tried to live in a spaceship without a kitchen?"

Gary accepted this as logical. He had, Ace thought, the look of someone who would accept quite a lot of things as logical right now, in part because he wasn't entirely sure there hadn't been hallucinogens in his morning tea.

"Oh, God, it's a spaceship," Janine said. "It's not a police box after all, it's a _spaceship,_ and he's an alien, and he's going to kidnap us and cut us up and put transmitters inside us and—"

"What would I want to do that for?"

_"I_ don't know, you're an alien!"

"That's a rubbish reason. Nobody does anything for reasons like that." Patrick and Todd carried the last of the Kshan in, and the Doctor did something arcane with the scanner. "No more life signs," he said, apparently to the universe in general. "I think—"

"What about the bodies?" Patrick said.

The Doctor looked up. "What about them?"

"We have to do something with the bodies. It's only right."

"Do what? We don't even know where they came from; be lucky to get the right planet, in some cases. And even if we did, what would we do with them? Materialize in some government office and say, 'here's a brace of desiccated corpses, sorry for the trouble, have a nice day?' That's a marvelous way to get shot, and by marvelous I mean potentially very painful and not marvelous at all."

"Well—good point. But we should at least bury them."

"Why?"

"Professor," Ace cut in, "he's right. We should do something." The Doctor looked at her quizzically. "Just—trust me. It's a human thing. We need it."

He studied her intently, then nodded. "Fair enough. What?"

"We're on an asteroid," Ace said. "Yeah? And you said it's pretty small, and we're probably somewhere in the solar system. Would it do any harm to drop it into the sun? Or Jupiter?" She looked around at the others. "Cremation is respectful, right? And it's—well, it's going to be—the equivalent of burial at sea, for most human space fleets. The thing you do for warriors fallen in battle."

There was general agreement with this motion, except for Janine. "No! I _demand_ you take us back to Earth, this instant! And let my children go! God knows what you want them for!" The Doctor turned back to the console, ignoring her. "You've already done enough," Janine ranted, "with your, your knockout gas or your phaser or however you did it, and God knows what sort of things you've implanted in them, and—and you ought to be in a lab, you ought to be _shot._ And _you!"_ She rounded on Ace. "You—you filthy bull-dyke _collaborator—"_

And then the Doctor was, abruptly, standing rather too close to her. "Everything outside your little prison cell," he said softly, "is evil. Is that really how the world looks to you?" Janine backed away from him, fetching up against the railing with the look of someone who had just realized they'd been tossing rocks at a live tiger. "Seeing wickedness everywhere because it makes your life exciting. Because you like to play Janine Haldiman versus the fall of civilization. And because you have, somewhere deep inside you, the feeling that you _ought_ to go out and fight evil, but when you saw the real thing—if you ever saw the real thing—you blinked." He dropped his voice almost to a whisper. "Would you like to know what true evil looks like?"

Nobody but Ace knew a fraction of the terrifying things the Doctor could do with words alone. _Everyone_ recognized the blood-freezing threat of it. There was a moment when absolutely nobody breathed.

_"No,"_ Ace said. "Professor—don't. I'm a big girl now, I can look after myself. A little name-calling isn't going to hurt me."

The Doctor turned around and regarded her for a moment. "True evil," he said over his shoulder to Janine, in a much more casual tone of voice, "looks nothing at all like _that."_ He pointed at Ace. "Now, if everyone will excuse me, I have an asteroid to move."


	7. Chapter 7

She'd made him stop.

She'd _made him stop._ Britney had known she was formidable, known that she was willing to go after an unknown menace with nothing but a baseball bat and iron will. But that was different, that was miles different, from the soul-deep peril the Doctor represented. Ace had as much as admitted that she couldn't stop _him_ from getting into her head, whenever he felt like, and she'd just said _no. Don't._ Without apologizing, without hedging, without fear. She told him to stop, and he did.

For the first time in years, Britney Prentiss knew who she wanted to be when she grew up.

She watched Ace, covertly, as they watched the asteroid burn, as they left the bald people in one of their hospitals and departed for Earth. Watched the easy way she talked with Manisha and Lree, as well as _him._ The way she stood, legs slightly farther apart than most girls, not afraid to take up space. The way she looked: short hair (although, despite Janine's slurs, not a buzz cut), no earrings, the leather jacket with the impossible pockets, running shoes. The way she moved. She wanted to memorize it all, for future reference. This was what courage looked like.

She was going to need courage. Very soon. They landed on Earth—how did they get from some planet in space to Earth, in only an hour or so?—and before long, everyone was collecting their things and filing out to call the police from a Tesco's. Britney swallowed and shouldered her duffel. They'd take her back, of course. Return her like so much useless merchandise. And it would be much harder to get away again. 

"Not you."

Instant dread. It was _him,_ and he was between her and the door. And she didn't know, she couldn't even imagine, what he wanted her for; it wouldn't be anything as sane or safe as what boys usually wanted. She managed, "I'm sor—" before he put his finger on her lips.

"Not even _close_ to what's happening." He turned halfway and raised his voice. "Ace?"

She was over by the door, but turned around and came back. "Yeah, Professor?"

"What are you going to do with Last-Name-Isn't-Smith?"

"What am _I_ going to do? Clear out the guest room, I guess, and get her a lawyer in the morning. Why, were you going to ask her along?" Ace looked past him to Britney, who was staring at her in pure shock. "What, did you think I'd tell you to go back to some toerag who hits you? Not gonna happen. Listen, let me get these guys sorted, then I'll be back." She went.

The Doctor put a finger gently underneath Britney's chin and shut her mouth. "Hope," he said, "and help, and people who fight the dragons. I did try to tell you." He gave her a strange, mad smile and spun back to his levers and switches.

~~~~~~~~

It was a while later and Ace was sitting on the side of an alien sand dune.

For most of the journey, Britney had attached herself to Ace like a limpet. Ace didn't mind exactly—Britney needed help, and Ace wasn't about to send her back into danger—but she was somewhat uncomfortable that the girl seemed to think she could sort _anything._

At least for now, though, Lree and Britney and Nisha were further down the beach, frolicking in bioluminescent surf. It was an eerie, always-shifting light, tinged perhaps the slightest bit green, riding the crests of the waves and leaving faintly glowing speckles on the sand, at least until the next wave came in. Both moons, the tiny potato-shaped one and the enormous one, were close to setting. There were no artificial lights on this planet, not yet, so it came down to moonlight, starlight, and the dancing glow of the sea. Night, but as different from the stifling blackness of the dolorovore's asteroid as anyone could imagine.

"You aren't going to join them?" the Doctor said, sitting down beside Ace.

"In a little while." She smiled as Britney squealed and covered her hair against a concerted splashing attack. "I did have some questions to ask you."

There was a moment of quiet, not tense, but somewhat pensive. "Regeneration," the Doctor said finally. "It's called regeneration."

"How you—change?"

He nodded slightly, almost imperceptibly. "It's—essentially, it's a work-around for death. Some kinds of death. Non-body-destroying, non-killing-me-instantly kinds of death. Every cell in my body floods with energy, and I—reformat. I turn into a different man. The _essence_ is the same, but all the little details of me: those change." He grimaced. "Also, I've been getting steadily younger. Which is more or less how it's supposed to work, trading in a failing body for a fitter one, but I've been _carded._ People over a thousand oughtn't to get carded. There should be a rule—are you all right?"

"You," Ace managed, "died."

"Sort of a bit, only not really. It's very much _like_ dying, but then there's the still-banging-around-afterward aspect. Which you have to admit is a rather large difference."

"But you _died._ You went off traveling without me—no, you went off traveling without anyone, didn't you? You didn't have anyone to look after you, and you—" The Doctor put his arm around her and hugged her close. Ace made a noise and let herself slump against him. "How?" she said, slightly muffled by tweed.

"Do you really want to know?"

"Yes! If you don't tell me, I'll keep—" Picturing things in her mind, each one nastier than the last.

"Oh, _Ace."_ The Doctor rested the side of his face against her hair. "I was shot. They took me to a hospital, a twentieth-century human hospital, and tried to save my life, which included surgery and a fairly sizeable dose of anaesthetic. It wasn't malice; they were doing their best to help. Just bad luck all around."

"Except for the people who _shot you."_ Oh, for a TARDIS of her own and a few cans of Nitro-9, she'd soon sort _that_ little problem—

Except she wouldn't. She couldn't. It would be criminally irresponsible to alter an event that had already affected her, and afterwards, what was the point?

"That was an accident too. More or less. Ace, it's all right. _I'm_ all right. Really." He ruffled her hair. "Trust me."

"Yeah, but—I should have been there."

"No. You have your own life. And it's a brilliant one, Ace. Dee McShane. It's a beautiful one. Manisha and Lree and saving the universe just by being kind to people and not caring where they come from. Normally, I'm the last person in favor of turning into a grown-up, but—" There was a catch in his voice. "It looks magnificent on you."

He was proud of her.

He was _proud_ of her. Ace had spent a lot of her life Not Caring what any authority figure thought, but— _he was proud of her._

She let it soak in for a moment, just basking in it like a cat in sunlight. "'Life is change,'" she said after a while. "Isn't that right?"

"Exactly." He looked at her, reassuring himself that she was all right, and then let go of her. "And it wasn't all bad, you know. That self, my eighth—people reacted to me differently. Rather startlingly so. I'm not entirely certain, but between one unexpected snog and another, not to mention getting fancied by all sorts of interesting people including Alan Turing, I _think_ I might have been a bit of a dish." He said the last word with the air of an octogenarian who thought he had learned youth slang from the telly and felt very proud of himself for it. "It was certainly an experience. What's that look for, then?"

It was Ace trying to decide if she was amused or weirded out. She was leaning towards _yes._ "Nothing," Ace said. "Just—how many bodies have you had?"

"This is my eleventh. The one you knew was my seventh." Ace told herself that she wasn't, wasn't, _wasn't_ going to ask for the details of all those deaths. Even the ones between her Professor and this one. The Doctor produced the sonic screwdriver from somewhere and fiddled with it in a vague sort of fashion. "When the dolorovore—I'm _still_ not convinced of that word—when it took its shot at you—"

"Yeah?" Ace said, when he hesitated for a moment.

"It was Fenric."

"Yeah."

"Not Manisha Purkayastha."

"I cried," Ace said. "A lot. When she died, I spent days—I would be fine, I would just be skating along not feeling anything at all, and then there'd be some random thing, some _stupid_ thing, and I'd be drowning in it again. But it wasn't despair. I didn't feel like dying. I felt like, if I could somehow scream out how _angry_ I was, I would crack the Earth in two. I always knew who was right and who was wrong. I knew who I was. With Fenric—you didn't leave me that."

"I'm sorry." It was almost a whisper.

Ace looked at him. This face was so full of emotion, when he decided to show it. And right now, he looked—much as he had when he failed to protect Britney. "Professor," she said gently, "you saved me. You saved the world for everyone. And then you let me know that you didn't mean it." Not just by telling her. Ace remembered her ongoing campaign of nicking the Professor's hat while he slept (or pretended to sleep for the sake of the game) and hiding it somewhere. The first time had been a lark; the next twenty or so had been to figure out how the _hell_ he managed to produce it from his pocket when it was under her bed. When she tried it again, two weeks after the Fenric incident, part of her had been sickly certain that he'd just say, _Ace, stop being childish and give me my hat._ Instead, he'd made such a show of patting down his pockets and 'dear me I'll forget my own head next I expect' and generally outrageous overacting—before conjuring the hat as usual—that he might as well have said, _Oh, Ace, I'm glad you're back._

"That generally counts as an apology," Ace went on. "And even if it didn't, I forgave you long ago. You know that, right?"

"I know. And I didn't engineer it. I hope you realize: I would never do that."

"Yeah," Ace said, "that's a big part of _why_ I forgive you." She was quiet for a long moment. Down on the beach, Nisha and Britney were busy trying to make a sandcastle with a "flaming" moat. If they couldn't get the ocean to cooperate, Ace thought, she could always show Britney a few tricks from her youth.

No, no, _no._ That would be irresponsible. And dangerous. And oh dear God she had turned into the Man. "What am I going to do with her?" Ace said, half to herself.

"You mean other than getting her a lawyer and a room?"

"Well, that, of course. But, I mean, she's—her attitude towards me—I don't know if you saw her, but with Janine, after I stepped in, the look on her face—"

"As if you're a hero," the Doctor said. "As if you hung the moon and the stars and can juggle lightning. As if you're made of magic. You're asking me what to do with a displaced teenage girl with issues who looks at you like that."

Oh. _Oh._ Well, that was—beyond surreal. Downright disorienting. "Yeah," Ace said, "I guess I am."

"Scramble like hell to be worthy of it."

Ace nodded. It made sense. There wasn't really much else.

She was silent for a moment. The large moon had almost touched the horizon. Its reflection made a brilliant white path across already-shimmering waves.

"I actually wanted to ask you about something else, too," Ace said, after a little while. "I have this friend—" Which sounded like a classic line, but it was actually true this time. "I have this friend who's never seen an extraterrestrial, never even read all that much science fiction, but she has the Narnian Look." The Doctor looked sideways at her. "It's sort of my own private term; I don't have a better word for it. People who've known aliens, or have some idea how crazy and wonderful it is out there, they've got this look of—perspective, I guess. Like they know, they really get how small the Earth is, but they get that it's amazing, too. Not all of them are people who've traveled with you, but I've met a few."

"Who?" He sounded fascinated. By news of his former friends or the notion that Ace could spot them, she wasn't sure.

"Well—a 'freelance troubleshooter' named Mickey Smith, I think. Helped me out of a really tight spot, tried to recruit me as his demolitions person. He didn't actually say anything about you, but when I looked him up, I found traces. And a bit of time where he vanished off the face of the Earth, which, you have to admit, says something."

"Ace McShane," the Doctor said, "have you taken up _computer hacking?"_

"Of course not, Professor! I never break the law. I'm a _good_ girl."

The Doctor grinned. "Good for you!"

"I'm pretty decent at it, too," Ace said happily. "Let's see. A pilot, Tegan Jovanka—she was one of your Names. She didn't want to talk about it much, but she said that if I ever bumped into you, I should tell you that she's sorry she left the way she did, she knows you're a good person, but she just couldn't deal with your life. I think she feels a bit guilty for not staying."

"Well, she shouldn't do. I understood." The Doctor shook his head. "If she'd told you just a little more, you would have found out about regeneration, by the way. She was there when my fifth self was born. And if she'd described me, you definitely would have noticed something a touch off."

"Well, she did mention that you wore a celery leaf. I knew that had changed." But she had accepted it without comment, Ace recalled, because a celery leaf wasn't _that_ far out of line with the Doctor's usual sartorial choices.

In more than one incarnation, apparently. She _had_ thought that "Chesterford" looked like an alien who had heard vague rumors of a thing called fashion but didn't quite comprehend it. She hadn't expected to be quite so spectacularly right.

"And—" Ace hesitated. "I had made up my mind that if I saw you, I wasn't going to tell you, because Dorrie Chaplet described you as a very old man. I thought she might be far in your future. But—"

"No," the Doctor said. "I wasn't. I was young. Very young. There was so much about the universe I didn't know—" He shook his head. "Is she—all right?"

Ace hesitated, then said, "Yes."

"Ace."

"Okay, she was sectioned for a while. But she's fine _now._ She does mental health advocacy. It's sort of a thing. Those three people, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Jo Grant, who I've seen on telly—most of the people who've traveled with you do _something_ to make the world better. Jo with her protests, Dorrie, even Tegan doing that environmental outreach stuff in her free time. We've all got the bug." She thought about it. "Well, except—possibly—for the seriously annoying woman who thanked me for looking out for you, kissed me on the cheek, dosed me with something that had me seeing purple tadpoles for three hours, and _nicked all my Nitro._ I couldn't tell you much about her."

"Yes . . ." If Ace hadn't known better, she would have sworn the Doctor was embarrassed, but his lips were also twitching. "She does that."

Ace decided to ignore the slight smile. People oughtn't to steal a girl's explosives. It just wasn't right. "At any rate, this friend of mine—she has the helping bug too. And that's not the only thing that made me wonder. She won the lottery—won _big—_ with a ticket that was given to her in an unsigned envelope at her wedding. That's a time traveler's trick if I ever heard one. And—what?"

"You can't tell her." The slight smile was gone, now. Very gone. He sounded like a man who'd been stabbed. 

Ace was quiet for a moment. "So it is a mind wipe, then."

"It had to be. I didn't—" His jaw worked. "I _did_ have a choice. I could have let her die. I could have watched as her brain incinerated itself, bit by bit over a period of several hours, starting with the linguistic centers and then the sensory cortices—she would have been alive and aware—"

"Doctor. _Doctor."_ Ace shook him slightly. "It's okay. I know you had to. I remember the other time I saw you wipe someone." A child, a little girl who had been rewired as a living battle computer. The Doctor hadn't been able to save a lot of her memories. He _had_ managed to salvage most of her basic skills. Language, relating to people, getting dressed in the morning. She would have normal intelligence, he'd said; she'd be able to live a normal life. With luck.

He had described the procedure as gruesome. Had he been this shaken by it, back then, and just hid it because Ace was young and depended on him? Did it always feel this _weird,_ talking to your mentor and wizard like an equal? 

The Doctor didn't look up. "I might have a solution," he said. "Possibly. It isn't complete, and when it is—if it is—it won't be safe. And I have to give her a choice this time, Ace. I owe her that. Only how do you ask? How do you work out whether someone would want you to risk their life when you can't even tell them why?"

"I don't know," Ace said, "but you've got me. She knows me, she likes me. I can at least keep her from throwing you out as a complete nutter." She put her hand over his, and he looked at it, as if he didn't know when he'd clenched it into a fist. "When you figure it out, look me up, all right? I'll help."

He turned his head to study her, and god, he looked as old as time. "You all keep forgiving me."

"Yeah. We do." What had happened since she left? And when had she suddenly grown up enough that it was her comforting him?

"Why?"

"Because—" It was a serious question, so Ace considered it seriously for a moment. "For me? Because you listen." The Doctor tilted his head quizzically. "When I told you to burn the dolorovore's asteroid, you did it. You didn't understand why we cared—you still don't, do you?—but you did it. When I asked you to back off from Janine, you listened. And you apologized, several times tonight, because you remember that it matters to me. You care what we think, Professor. It shows. And that's important, especially for someone who could treat people as wind-up toys if he wanted to."

"If I had to break your faith in me now," the Doctor said, sounding a little bit hoarse, "I couldn't do it. Could I."

"Probably not. Could I break yours, in me?"

A smile, slow, but as true as they came. "Never."


End file.
